The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport said more than 4,000 young Cambodians received training through the National Business Programme for Youth to mark Cambodia Entrepreneurship Day 2021, which took place in late September.

Sroy Socheat, head of the ministry's General Department of Youth, said the programme is designed to promote business knowledge and entrepreneurship along with other basic skills in order to capture the imagination of prospective sustainability-focused entrepreneurs to assist them in achieving big success in Cambodia.

The programme also encourages learning and sharing knowledge by word of mouth and socially from one friend to another among young people because it wants to increase Cambodian youths’ ability to embrace adaptation and boost the psychological resilience among young people throughout Cambodia during this troubled Covid-19 pandemic period.

She said that despite the Covid-19 crisis, the training courses attracted 4,422 young people as participants – an encouraging 2,788 of whom were women.

"The courses focused on strategies, activities and lessons on business readiness focusing on four key areas --defining a business vision, selecting ideas, understanding the market and building business plans.

“We then shuffled the students into small groups and had a competition where each group had to create a business plan together and eventually held a presentation on their business ideas,” she said.

According to Socheat, the programme was organised by the education ministry and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), in collaboration with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Pact Cambodia, and supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) through Decent Employment for Youth (DEY) programme, the Japanese government, Smart Axiata and Wing Bank (Cambodia) Plc.