Business Education and Entrepreneurship


Though employment and self-employment are two alternative goals for most of the Graduates of CMES programs, employment opportunities are limited in rural Bangladesh. Therefore the predominant option for them is to be self-employed. CMES has organized its programs with this imperative in the forefront. It encourages and trains its target group in entrepreneurship and provides all possible assistance to them so that they can start their own micro enterprises.

Business Education:
Business education is a part of the curricula of the Basic School System (BSS) and Adolescent Girls’ Program (AGP) of CMES. This is realized through step by step trainings in things one has to learn while starting a business – planning, financing, organizing production, trading or services, marketing, keeping accounts etc. In fact the general environment of BSS and AGP encourage a business-like approach in many of its aspects, and therefore the youth in CMES have good opportunities to learn business practices first hand. A book has been especially developed for the purpose titled ‘How To Be A Business-Person’. This is fully based on actual microenterprises by CMES graduates and other like them – and contains many practical problems and exercises modeled on those. Business education for CMES does not come as a theoretical knowledge good to know, but an essential ingradient to the young people preparing for the real things. The BSS and AGP members, therefore, get early familiarity with the concepts of so called ‘School Company’ and ‘Graduate Company’. The former is business practices within the school program mainly as a part of learning practices, while the latter are the businesses the graduates take up as their self-employment efforts. The Microcredit system of CMES is one of the supports that the organization provides to the latter. The business education, therefore, contains adequate aspects of microcredit including its philosophy, discipline, utilization and calculations (of interest, savings, and business ratios). CMES also assist the graduates with technology upgradations, retraining, marketing, promotions etc.

Self-Employed Youth & Women’s Social Enterprise (SEY-WO-SE)

This is an umbrella outfit that tries to organize the graduates and enhance their capacity for a better business. The idea is to invite the graduates to act as partners to CMES, so that the latter can explore higher market, bundle the efforts of the self-employed youth and women working with CMES, and to create better profitability of their work. Much of the works of these graduates are decentralized into their own premises – but CMES tries to help by collecting orders, providing quality control, providing a dependable brand to their products, and investing the initial capitals as well as putting together technology infrastructure if needed.

Community Social Enterprise (CSE)

CSE is another strategy to help the graduates, and to promote their businesses. This involves community members of philanthropic mindset who want to be proactive in human resource development. It also involves local artisans and craftsmen who would like to work with CMES. Thus further microenterprises are created based on their initiatives – which include CMES youths as employee or partners into these. CMES provides to CSE the similar supports as it does to SEY-WO-SE.

Internship in Real-life Enterprise (IRE)

This has been an experimental project of CMES which it conducted for six years in partnership with Enfant du Monde (EDM) of Switzerland. This provided opportunity to some students of CMES to adopt unique form of technical education involving both schooling and apprenticeship in local enterprises. This gave them a more real life training in technical and business skills. Within this program a vital partnership could be established between CMES schools and local enterprises creating a win-win situation for the students and the enterprise owners. CMES schools provide the basic technology education in a trade for six months, and then places the student in the enterprise for the next six months, while CMES monitors their progress and well being, and also provides them regular sandwich courses. It has been a great success, though a totally new concept in Bangladesh. CMES is now mainstreaming the strategy in its Basic School System.