A little over two weeks ago, we showed you the women of the Freetown Women's Group, who started entrepreneurial training to help them build their businesses. Today, those 25 women graduated and were all given grants to assist them. At the closing ceremony, we heard a bit about what they learnt during the training.
Maria Marin, President, Freetown UWG
"The training lasted more or less like three week and it involved intense training in business management, we had the women describe their business, we had them come up with a business plan, have them come up with a financial plan, where do they hope their business to go, maybe a year, the projection a year or two, where do they see their business. And then we assisted them with the proper help because a lot of them, they don't know much about business, they just run and do a business and they don't know that they could make a big profit but yes we assisted them as best as we could with a proper business plan and projections that definitely their business could reach."
Irene Wu, Embassy of Taiwan
"We think this training is timely and very relevant to help the women in the community to strengthen your marketing strategy and to empowering growth and to build resilience. This is in line with the main goal of the Women's Empowerment Project that has been going on collaborated between the Government of Taiwan and Belize for the past two years."
Kelsey Codd, Grace Skincare by Kelsey
"It was definitely, I believe a needed training, especially in the field of women entrepreneurship. I feel like a lot of Belizean women have their businesses but lack certain strategies in terms of marketing and production so it definitely widens the horizons for the women in this program."
"I decided to become an entrepreneur because I wanted to create self empowerment for myself as a woman and I always had a drive to be creative and to have a vision in terms of creating something that was sustainable for Belizeans."
"As it regards to marketing and production, I plan to use the funding that we got here for that specifically, I believe marketing is what helps to build a business and so I'm definitely looking forward to pushing more marketing strategies out there and to build my business."
The value of the grants were about $2,000.
