The apparel producing Small and Medium Enterprises must be facilitated to grow through special training programs in skills, marketing, and finance advise experts.
There are tens of thousands of SMEs in apparel making small contributions to our exports. The apparel exports would increase manifold in short time if they were scaled up by removing the deficiencies of skilled workforce, marketing, and financial expertise
We need to transform
micro businesses to SMEs that are engines of growth the world over” said
development expert Abdul Hameed. He said SMEs employ 10-250 workers and are
great innovators. He said globally many SMEs have grown into multinational
enterprises but not so in Pakistan., India or Bangladesh. However, he added that a few micro enterprises have graduated to the SME sector
in Pakistan. He said most of the SMEs in Sialkot started as micro enterprises.
He said governments have spent billions in facilitating micro enterprise to take them up the ladder. However, he revealed few achieved successes. He said apparel producers have the potential to grow up but planners never paid attention to their deficiencies.
He said business training does not matter for those small business owners that operate their enterprises to attain subsistence level and have no desire to become entrepreneurs and to scale up. In fact, many micro entrepreneurs go through the motions just to supplement the family income. He said most of them would in fact prefer to get employed if a chance is given to them. He said the training programs for the entrepreneurs should identify such cases before starting training.
Apparel sector entrepreneur M I Khurram said another important fact that has to be taken into account is the intensity of the training program. Small and micro entrepreneurs he added may not be able to attend long training programs that may force them to devote less time to their enterprise. He said training programs usually evaluate separate dimensions of business expertise into different training courses focused specifically on marketing, or finance, or operations. Taken together, the lack of sustained impacts of building entrepreneurs’ business skills could (in part) be due to prior study interventions providing general business skills to a mixed group of subsistence and growth-oriented entrepreneurs over a relatively short period of time.
He said the first step before enrolling a micro entrepreneur is to identify micro entrepreneurs that are relatively more established as they usually also have to grow. He said since these entrepreneurs do not have the capacity to pay, the training has to be provided by an NGO or government institute that provides free training.
He said those micro entrepreneurs that have some entrepreneurial spirit go for accelerated growth once they are trained in marketing tools. He said the entrepreneurs’ leads from the front in marketing and sales activities. Higher sales he added increased the profits of the company as well. When imparted with finance training the focus of entrepreneurs’ shifts towards greater efficiency he added. He said this training equips them with tools to lower costs of inputs and give attention to operational efficiency.
He said to train micro or small entrepreneurs the training institute should evaluate which type of training that would help the owner more. He said for some it could be market and for other finance or skill training.
