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2.02 |
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142.40 |
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255.91 |
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201.79 |
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Prince Charles, third from left, speaking at the venture capital workshop organised by Public Establishment for Industrial Estates in association with UK trade and investment, here yesterday. Photo – Supplied photo
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Muscat: Business people from different sectors should act as volunteers to serve as business mentors to young entrepreneurs, said Prince Charles speaking at the venture capital workshop organised by Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE) in association with UK trade and investment, here yesterday.
Prince Charles said, "When a fresh entrepreneur starts a business, mentoring makes a huge difference. So, this handholding in the initial years will help in the entrepreneurial journey. In the United Kingdom, we have 7,000 volunteers who make a fantastic difference to the young people who are gearing up to getting into business." Talking about the Prince's Trust, Prince Charles said, "Thirty-seven years ago in the UK, I started a youth trust when I left the royal navy and the time was the beginning of increasing unemployment. Then young people lagged opportunities to develop their full potential and bring out their talent. And the situation began to get worse in beginning of 1980. One thing we looked at was in order to address the issue we need to encourage self employment and business enterprise among young people."
He added, "In the last 30 years we have developed an approach which assist young people to start their own enterprises. We have so far invested in nearly 80,000 businesses. The encouraging thing for me is to see so many young people when we started 30-35 years ago have become millionaires and successful and these very people now want to come back to us to re-invest some of their money in other young people." Prince Charles further added, "We have another scheme where we impart a two-week course to enable young people to help develop skills in the aptitude they have, be it in the domain of farming, retail, construction, etc."
Soft loans
He added, "The key issue what we find is the access of funds for start-ups. What we discover in the end that the best system was to provide loans at a very low interest in the first two years and then retch it up according to whatever way you want to do it."
Earlier, Ahmed Al Dheeb, chairman of PEIE, welcomed. Malak Ahmed Al Shaibani, director-general of National Business Centre, said that SME contribution to the GDP was 13.8 per cent valued at $9.8 billion. She said among the private SME funding were Sharaka (youth fund) established in 1988; Grofin Fund supported by Shell; commercial banks and Omifco. She said the key challenges in funding are limited funding options for start-ups; requirements to get funding are cumbersome and bureaucratic; financing organistions do not fund ideas or innovations; entrepreneurs prefer sharia-compliant instruments and lack of technical expertise and experience in organisations funding SME."
Bill Morrow, founder and chief executive of Angels Den, an UK-based Angel investor, made an introductory presentation on venture capital. The session was followed by a panel discussion on regulation and markets.
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