Smariddhi Foundation officially started Global Entrepreneurship Week 2018 celebration in Nepal with the event – Ecosystem Connect – on 12th November, 2018. The objective behind the event was to begin a policy dialogue between entrepreneurs to discuss about the issues that persisted in Nepal that hindered the creation of conducive environment for innovation and entrepreneurship.
Nepal has many unleashed sectors in its business market, providing tremendous opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs who wish to get out of their comfort zone and take calculated risk. In fact, number of startup in the country are increasing, and some are doing exceptionally great. However, it also is true that many startups have vanished from the market within the span of five years of commencement. The substandard growth in this sector despite might have been caused by various reasons – some major causes are related to difficult policy landscape, inadequate access to finance, disintegrated entrepreneurship ecosystem and substandard education delivery mechanism.
Addressing these issues, the event Ecosystem Connect was designed. The idea was to form an entrepreneurs’ community where entrepreneurs could share their experience, stories and valuable insights, given that they encountered policy hindrances on the following five issues:
- Policy Landscapes in entrepreneurship
- Financing Entrepreneurship
- Fostering E-Financing
- Self-Sustaining Entrepreneurship Ecosystem
- Entrepreneurial Education
The event featured 35 entrepreneurs from different sectors who were divided into five groups (each consisting up to 7 discussants) and one moderator per group. The moderators – Mr. Akash Shrestha (Samriddhi Foundation), Mr. Surath Giri (Nepal Prosperity Institure), Mr. Biswas Dhakal (F1Soft International), Mr. Niraj Khanal (Antarprerana) and Mr. Pavitra Gautam (Karkhana) – were experts of the concerned fields. Each group led by their respective moderators, deliberated over the specific topic provided to them.
The program also aimed to be informative and educational, stretching well beyond the participants who physically participated in the event. Thus, Samriddhi Foundation further has planned to create briefs of the addressed issues and distribute it among entrepreneurs, policy makers and other concerned stakeholders. This will be followed by another event – Policy Bottlenecks in Entrepreneurship – which will run in the framework of a panel discussion between various policy makers who will suggest reform agendas for the same, in order to create an entrepreneurship-friendly policy regime in Nepal.