The Youth Front Against Drug and Alcohol Abuse recently provided supplementary training on business management for thirty young people from different links of the organization across the country.
The first training, held at Jarra Soma, brought together young entrepreneurs from Jarra Soma and Jenoi in the Lower River Region, Brikamaba in the Central River Region, and Njaba Kunda in the North Bank Region.
The second training took place at Jiffarong village in Kiang West with participants from Jiffarong and Nema in Kiang and Wassadu in Foni, West Coast Region.
Alasana Trawally, coordinator of the project, said the training was a follow-up capacity building to a basic training on business establishment done for the participants last year.
“This project is intended to effect a positive change of lives of the people in different communities through our graduating members from the courses offered to them. It is also a youth empowerment project geared towards keeping youth in their own villages by running their own businesses,” he said.
He added that each of the participants was supported to establish a business with the condition that after their successful thrive in their own businesses, more people will be given the same opportunity to discover themselves as businessmen and women.
In his presentation, Ebrima Kinteh, one of the resource persons at the training, said the core principle of a successful business is to set up clear objectives that dictate income and profit generation.
The participants, he noted, should be able to plant businesses which can grow side by side with all the risks associated with them.
According to him, prior to a successful business there is a need for the proprietor to conduct environmental scanning and feasibility study to create a suitable niche for the business in the market.
Amadou Bah, another resource person at the training, focused his lessons on applicable methods in responding to the major factors hindering the survival of small business enterprises in the case of the targeted communities for their project.
On competition among business players, Mr Bah said it is wiser for his trainees to think about how to increase the quality of their products and services by making use of the available resources and opportunities than working only on quantity.
According to him, where buying cheap commodities such as groundnut during a particular time could later on result into difficulties in marketing the product mainly due to poor road network or transportation cost, it is better to consider dealing with other commodities.
He enjoined the participants to the training to adopt planning and budgeting as a key pillar to guiding the survival of their businesses.
Momodou Sanneh, Chairperson of LRR link of Youth Front Against Drug and Alcohol, said the participation of young people in the business industry is intended to add value to the lives of the people in communities in which they are operating.
Based on the testimonies from their project sites, Mr Sanneh said that some of the Youth Front’s supported business enterprises are able to bring down prices of several commodities in the market thanks to their own business strategies.
In the long run, he said, it is hoped that the presence of many visionary young people in the market will dictate the emergence of better prices and market culture.