Closing ceremony of projects on support to the SMEs in Azerbaijan
On the 22nd of February, the joint Project Closing Ceremony was held for the two projects funded by European Union in Azerbaijan– “Support to the Government of Azerbaijan in creating more enabling SME’s environment and to enhance their competitiveness” and “Support to Entrepreneurial Development in Rural Areas”.
Both projects shared the same beneficiary institutions, through the provision of technical assistance to the Ministry of Economy and The Small and Medium Business Development Agency (SMBDA) for the support and promotion of SMEs and Entrepreneur competitiveness.
A team of around 50 international and local experts (for both projects) provided expertise in different areas in order to implement planned outputs and deliverables.
The joint Closing Conference had among its key speakers and presenters, the Chairman of SMBDA, Mr. Orkhan Mammadov and European Union Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Mr. Peter Michalko. Projects implementing partners were represented by Mr. Ilgar Mehti, the director of Ekvita and Dr. Dimitrios Bakolas, President of European Profiles.
In total, the budget of the two projects was around 3 million euros which were allocated by the European Union to implement a number of activities to strengthen the capacity and skills of the staff of the project beneficiary institutions, including:
– improvement of the capacity to effectively design and manage SME support projects through the creation of a Project Management system for SMBDA;
– the creation of digitalized Monitoring and Evaluation system for effective and impactful performance measurement in the SMBDA network of organizations such as the 25+ SME Development Centres which support SMEs and entrepreneurs all over the country;
– recommendations to promote SME clustering, partnerships and Innovative financial mechanisms to support SMEs/Entrepreneurs;
-development of instruments to support entrepreneurship among women, young people as well as disabled and elderly people;
-a suite of 10 e-learning modules on different aspects of small business operation, including the green economy and rural tourism;
-multi-stakeholder platform was also developed to ensure SMBDA’s position at the center of SME development in Azerbaijan.
Despite COVID 19, projects were able to organise study visits to Turkey, Spain, Greece and Romania to learn best practices, to meet policymakers, business support organisations and privately owned SMEs.
Over 400 participants from SMBDA/MOE´s top management, middle management and staff participated in the capacity building and training programmes physically and virtual.
Through EU-funded projects support was provided to the institutions responsible to promote the SMEs and entrepreneurship ecosystems in Azerbaijan to better prepare and to keep enhancing and extending the public-private partnerships, University- Private sector collaboration for the continued growth of the SMEs and Entrepreneurship in the country.
