210 Ugandan SMEs graduate with business management training
Some 210 Ugandan SMEs have graduated from a training sponsored by Stanbic Bank which focused on growing and sustaining businesses.
Concentrating on the fundamentals of business operations including leadership and governance, finance and customer care among others, the training sought to solidify the growing role of SMEs in growing the country’s economy as big players increasingly look for bailouts.
“We have begun to see large enterprises start to seek for bailout. But what is causing giants go through this stress is failure to address the normal basic fundamentals. These are leadership and governance, talent management, operations, marketing and customer care and finance,” said Mr Charles Ocici, executive director of Enterprise Uganda.
Negation by the giant businesses in Uganda to address the other basic fundamentals of running enterprises and only consider finances as crucial is the reason many are crumbling.
According to the 2015 Global Entrepreneurs Monitor report, Uganda had the best entrepreneurship growth rate at 28 per cent.
However, the country faces a big challenge of sustaining these businesses, as more than half of the businesses started don’t live to celebrate their first anniversary.
Mr Ocici said many giant companies think the only rescue to their crumbling businesses is finance but the key to this was to address all the other pillars outside finance.
“When you talk about hard economy, it’s hard for everybody but despite certain enterprises continuing to thrive and yet others are collapsing. If these fundamentals are not addressed then many businesses will continue collapsing,” he said.
Mr Ocici said SMEs were becoming key for enterprise success in Uganda, adding that there cannot be a strong economy in agriculture without a strong SME sector because they stand in the gap to bring the micro-entrepreneurs and grow them big.
He advised the 210 SMEs to pass on their businesses to the next generation, who will expand locally, regionally and internationally.
“If this is not followed now, we are running giant enterprises that are standing on clay feet which will not survive because they have forgotten the basic fundamentals,” Mr Ocici said.
Mr Kevin Wingfield, Stanbic Bank head of personal and business banking, said they supported the SMEs training to tighten the loose knots in the way they operate.
