In this interview, Juergen Burks – team leader of PEM Concult of the “Startup Promotion Project” and Jumaboy Shokhmurodov – National Expert of the “Startup Promotion Project in Tajikistan”, spoke about the main points of this stage and who will pass it.
Mr. Jürgen, briefly describe the coaching program, what will it include?
- We started our activities in Tajikistan two years ago and now we have more than 50 startups that are at the beginning of their activities and most of them are officially registered. In the first stages, it is very important that such individuals use our consulting services to solve various issues, for example, how to negotiate with clients and partners? How to find new clients? How to conclude contracts? What is marketing and things like that. And that’s why we have a team of experts to help these participants get their business off on the right foot.
Mr. Jumaboy, why do you think every startup needs to go through the coaching stage?
- Every startup faces challenges and questions at the beginning of their business, and they need a mentor. As our team leader pointed out, we have a team of experts who can advise these young people on how to solve their problems.
Who will participate in coaching and mentoring?
- As you know, after conducting development programs, we received 50 innovative startups that officially registered their activities. About 40% of them are led by women. Among them are ideas from different directions and some of them are innovative. As you know, the project has developed startup camps and development programs, which resulted in the registration of 50 entrepreneurs, and they passed and became participants in this phase.
What are the next steps in the project?
- In the future we want to continue this successful process in Tajikistan. We also want to focus on innovative ideas towards new technologies, with a scalable business model, and this program for the next 2 years will focus on technology-driven business models. So we are thinking about finding new partners, especially in Dushanbe and Khujand. We that we want to expand our project to other mountain areas and help small businesses, especially in the food industry, and we want to provide them with some of the equipment. Hopefully, we can start this activity in the spring of 2022 and continue until the middle of 2024.
Many thanks to our interviewers for their answers and their time.