Three local youths have developed an app to help young would-be entrepreneurs access quality business training.
The app, named “Green Thumb Creatives,” was conceived after the creators enrolled to participate in the Generation Unlimited Youth Challenge, which is a joint United Nations Children’s Fund and United Nations Development Programme initiative aimed at encouraging young innovators to design solutions to improve education, employment and civic engagement.
As part of this year’s challenge, participants were asked to come up with a solution to either ensure that vulnerable youth stay in school or to help youths develop structured enterprises and businesses.
The local team of Nareema Khan, Deopaul Somwaru and Khadidja Ba focused on the latter. Ba said that she and Khan came up with the solution of having an app which would be used to give youths a “one-stop-shop” option for accessing business training, branding and packaging training, funding opportunities and links to forms and documents needed to register businesses and qualify for loans and grants etc., thereby circumventing the hassle of running around to get businesses started or properly registered.
Ba noted that even though the challenge focused on youths with an informal business structure, they wanted to open it to those who are interested in forming a business, and hence the app has information for those who may want to start a business, and get aligned with getting loans.
“We have many youths in Guyana who are in the creative industry—you know singers, musicians, even artists—who intend to just do it and make enough money to survive but not make enough money to, you know, have a properly functioning business and that’s something we want to assist them with. We aim to be able to provide them with the necessary training and everything else. Realistically, they probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it because, honestly, business training and branding training, as we know it, is pretty expensive. But that’s the quality of work they have, you know. So we wanted to provide them with free training and free content and all of that stuff and we now have it. Because we have all the content and all the material,” Ba explained.
She said that she and her team members have contacted mentors to aid with the training. “We reached out to Dr. Vishnu Doerga to mentor for business training and Dr. Rosh Khan to mentor for branding and packaging,” she said.
Ba noted that the Small Business Bureau has been generous with helping to provide data on how small businesses operate and has offered to provide them with funding should they need it later on to develop the app. Ba also said that the app would be useful as it will be training youths on how to run successful businesses while adding to the government’s taxpayers’ list, therefore building the economy.
For now use of the app, which is available online at https://bit.ly/2QU0AjB, will be free but they plan on eventually incorporating a way for users to pay a small fee for the training provided.