Entrepreneurship and enterprise development

Sustainable enterprises should innovate, adopt appropriate environmentally friendly technologies, develop skills and human resources, and enhance productivity to remain competitive in national and international markets’’. ILO-Labour Conference 2007

Small Enterprise Development Programme works to strengthen entrepreneurial management skills through capacity building and training resources that foster adoption of good workplace practices in micro-, small and large enterprises. In the area of management training, ILO has training tools that cover the whole spectrum of target groups, from illiterate micro entrepreneurs to growth oriented small and medium scale entrepreneurs.

At the entrepreneurship development level, a key role of the programme is to develop tools and programmes that deal with the long term effects of entrepreneurial culture. In this regard, ILO has developed Know About Business (KAB), a practical tool that addresses the challenge of youth unemployment highlighted in the Millennium Development Goals. Its general objective is to contribute towards the creation of an enterprise culture in a country or society, as stipulated by the ILO recommendation 189, by promoting awareness among young people of the opportunities and challenges of entrepreneurship and self-employment, and of their role in shaping their future and that of their country's economic and social development. ILO seeks to promote an enterprise culture within which cooperative and private enterprises strive for better livelihoods for workers and employers, and for higher productivity and sustained competitiveness of enterprises, while respecting the rule of law and workers' rights.

The Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) programme is a management-training programme with a focus on starting and improving small businesses as a strategy for creating more and better employment in developing economies and economies in transition. The long-term overall SIYB objective is to contribute to economic growth in general, and to the creation of more and better jobs in micro- and small enterprises (MSEs) in particular.

The Expand Your Business (EYB) is an integrated business training and support package for small- to medium-scale enterprises which have growth objectives in mind. These small and medium enterprises with growth potential are called Growth-Oriented Enterprises (GOEs). The EYB programme is "integrated" because it provides a number of interventions which are important to the growth and expansion of businesses. These include both training and non-training interventions.

ILO Labour Conference 2007 declaration on ‘Sustainable Enterprises’ provides a framework for developing an ILO 21st century vision on developing enterprises that contribute to job creation. This global consensus arrived at by tripartite discussion between governments, employers and workers, provide a powerful shared vision that draws on the latest thinking on sustainable development, entrepreneurship promotion and good corporate citizenship.