Background

All over ASEAN countries, MSMEs make up more than 90 per cent of all domestic firms and 75-90 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce. Needless to say, the barriers to entry, survive and maintain a sustainable growth for entrepreneurs are multidimensional; there are issues with funding, legal set-up, implementation approach, access to market research, lack of conducive business environment, et cetera. One punctuated issues that is highlighted in this project is the “lack of information”—there is a lack of accessible information on how to operate and grow a business, especially that each businesses has their own specificities according to their specific field.

The Ministry of Cooperatives together with ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta are collaborating in this “ASEAN Small Business Competitiveness Program” where in short, the project can be described as follows :

“Providing a set of tools for countries across ASEAN to develop and upgrade specific micro/small business in common sectors, providing entrepreneurs and those who work with them guidance on how to establish, run and improve businesses– boosting competitiveness, improving services and creating jobs”

The Project in particular will support the following programme in ASEAN:

1. The ASEAN Strategic Plan for SME Development (2010-2015) as it will help to improve the competitiveness of SME;
2. The ASEAN Roadmap, Community Blueprint, and Labour as it will promote entrepreneurships development; and
3. Ministry of Cooperatives’ initiatives to develop the local ecotourism MSMEs in Bali.

Eight common sectors have been chosen for their toolkits to be developed and disseminated in the course of the project and in this first phase five of these eight toolkits will be piloted. The ILO-Jakarta office has decided to engage a service provider partner that will mainly assist in adapting, organizing and facilitating the venue, itinerary and planning of the two days occasion3. We invite proposals from the shortlisted qualified and eligible local service providers notably active in the area of ecotourism in Bali, to take up this assignment.

Objective of the Assignment

Direct objective of the pilot workshop is to:

• test whether the developed toolkits is useful for the direct beneficiaries, given the limited institutional capacity; and
• see whether there is space of improvement in terms of content and approach in delivering the toolbox at the local context.

Beyond the scope of this assignment, the report of the pilot test will eventually be presented to the ASEAN SME Working Group through the Ministry of Cooperative and ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta. When there is need from local community, institutional partners engaged may choose to do follow-up workshop (e.g. in-dept coverage of financial literacy/budgets).

Workshop Approach: C-BED Activity Learning Experience

In this pilot project of introducing ASEAN Business Toolkits for social and eco-responsible guest- houses, the ILO is intending to implement Community-Based Enterprise Development (C-BED), an Activity Learning Experience that is low-cost, easily implementable training approach that had been widely implemented to help entrepreneurs and micro-business owners to improve their business5.

C-BED method is carried out without external trainers or resources, hence it has great utility in poor marginalized communities, where funding is limited or communities are hard to reach due to social or geographical isolation. The toolkits developed themselves are designed for ease of use, in a trainer-less fashion, so they can be rolled out with and by low capacity institutions. An action-based group learning is implemented, where participants work together in small groups to solve problems and through sharing existing knowledge and experiences, entrepreneurs are able to help each other understand formal business concepts, like costing or marketing, and develop stronger skills for business improvement.

The course of the training will guide the participants in articulating how abstract business concepts (for example, pricing or record-keeping) can make a difference for their own guesthouses businesses, reflecting on their day-to-day observations. They should also have an “action plan” for concrete steps to take that reflect not just textbook material, but the lessons learned by their peers within the specific context of the community. More about this methodology can be read at this link : http://cb-tools.org/.

Together with ILO Jakarta, potential partners that will participate and observe the training, will be identified. As mentioned in previous section, the participants will consist of multiple governmental agencies, NGOs, related (small) business associations and Academias from surrounding Tabanan-Bali area. Facilitators of the workshop will be picked at the first day from each group of the participants.