Workshop on RED Strategy for Chief Executives of NGOs

Rural Entrepreneurship Development (RED) Programmes, precede the Workshop on RED Strategy for Chief Executives of NGOs. The Workshop aims at exposing the participants to the changing socio-economic scenario and the role of NGOs in the promotion of micro enterprises in rural areas. The focus is also on evolving a need based training approach for rural enterprise promotion and helping NGOs form a national network and draw the future course of action. The Need Rural India continues to suffer from lack of employment and self-employment opportunities. Efforts by government and non-government organisations have achieved only a limited success in these directions. In the recent past, considerable success has been achieved in developing human resources through Entrepreneurship Development Approach. EDI successfully undertook an experimental project supported by Ford Foundation on rural Entrepreneurship Development for evolving a well tested and replicable training model for promoting entrepreneurship among rural poor. One of the important lessons of this three - year three - state experiment was that NGO sector is well suited to undertake entrepreneurship development activities at the rural level. EDI subsequently has implementated this approach in collaboration with a few NGOs and has helped many other NGOs institutionalise RED approach by training their development workers. Our extensive interactions with a numbers of NGOs indicate that though some of them are involved in promoting income generation activities, there is a need to make them aware of systematic approach to promote micro enterprises and to help them to undertake such a task in an organised manner as well as on sustainable basis in this sector.