THE Centre for Local Business Development, on Tuesday, officially opened its application process for the second installment of its Accelerate-Her programme.

Accelerate-Her is an entrepreneurship programme that offers training, business acceleration workshops and professional mentoring to assist women to grow their businesses.

During the virtual opening, the centre’s director, Natasha Gaskin-Peters, stated that it was found that women-owned businesses mostly operated in areas that were not core to the oil and gas sector and so, in order to make the businesses better equipped, the Accelerate-Her programme was launched last year.

Giving further details about the programme, Gaskin-Peters said, “This programme entails coaching, it entails mentoring, it entails training of female entrepreneurs and so, today, we have launched the call for applications for this particular programme.”

She added that the programme will also see successful applicants participating in a bootcamp and further mentorship programme.
The call for applications is expected to last until April 8, 2022.

The director encouraged women entrepreneurs who are interested in building capacity to apply, and, when the application process closes, assessment will be done and about 35 persons will be chosen.

Subsequently, it was noted that the participants will then move on to the bootcamp activity where they will be introduced to the business model canvas, along with assessing their businesses for growth.
To that end, she indicated that following the bootcamp, 15 participants will be chosen to move on to a 13-week programme.

“This is where we will do a gap assessment on their business. We will try to understand where their strengths are, where their weaknesses are. We will pair them with mentors, we will also train them in human resource management, supply chain management and financial management. We will also pair them with business coaches who will help them along their entrepreneurship journey,” Gaskin-Peters said.

With that, it was revealed that the programme is being funded by the Greater Guyana Initiative and as such it was free of cost to participants.
The director indicated that while the initial number of participants slated for the bootcamp is 35, they are hoping to take in around 40 in order to capture as many women-owned businesses as possible.

She added that while last year’s programme ran for around 10-weeks, it has been expanded this year to have breaks so as to enable the business owners to implement what they learned in the programme almost immediately.

Interested entrepreneurs can sign up for the Accelerate-Her programme through the Centre for Local Business Development’s website at www.centreguyana.com and have access to more information about the upcoming programme.