“The Programme Fits In The Idea Of Formalisation Of Enterprises”

What will be the crux of the partnership between Apme and ILO in the "Start and improve your business" programme?

The programme “Start and improve your business” is a programme which ILO presented several years ago and that has been applied in more than a thousand countries. We have successfully applied this programme and we think that it is a good programme which fits very well in the ideas of formalisation of enterprises which we are promoting. Because we have other activities in other regions of the country we thought that we should take “Start and improve your business” in the North West and South West regions, then we move to other regions.

Concretely, how will this programme be implemented?

Concretely, it is a capacity building programme. We are starting with the training of trainers. Because we don’t want to call ILO all the time to come and train us. Moreover, most of their experts are out of Cameroon. It is going to be very expensive for government to call on ILO all the times. We will first of all train trainers who will then train enterprises. The first stage for us now is to go down to the regions and select young people who have interest in entrepreneurship education, capacity building, expertise in small and medium sized enterprises, business development, etc. We will select 25 of them, representative of the different divisions of the regions. We don’t only have the ILO training. We equally have other training of trainers for business development providers who will be working on agency activities. We are binging in ILO because we want to make sure that their trainers also remain in Cameroon and so that we can use those trainers to train in all other domains.

After the training of trainers, we will come back to the joint board to carry out a selection of enterprises. Here we are talking about enterprises which have been created in our centres. Some of them are new. We want to see those that still exist and make sure that they are progressing within the standards procedures which have been approved. If you take the agro-food processing sector for example and you are producing without the simple rules of hazard analysis physical control poin...