JCC, MasterCard Foundation partner to fuel innovative business

Jobs Creation Commission (JCC) in collaboration with MasterCard Foundation is set to award 200 new and innovative businesses on the program that will be held in the coming three years.
On the program launching ceremony, Alemtsehay Dersolegn, Director of Innovative Jobs and Projects of JCC explained that some of the winners will be expected to be well known enterprises globally in the coming at least ten years’ time.
The initiative will be started in the current year and for first year, 20 winners will be selected, while an additional 10 would get the award for their business idea besides the 20 winners that will get ample attention to attain their business dream to be successful.
The commission has announced that the registration for the business ideas competition that is called ‘Bruh’ commenced on January 9 and will be open for one month until February 7.
The application shall be done via online on bruh-et.com or offices in towns throughout the country. Alemtsehay said that 500 business ideas that may contain 1000 youths will be selected and those selected individuals will get extended training for one month before they appeared to juries to present their business ideas.
“On the competition process, 300 business ideas from 500 will be short listed and included on the award, while from the 300 business ideas the 200 business ideas will be selected to get business development support or business acceleration that have a six months period,” she said.
“The main objective of the Bruh initiatve is to get youths that have different innovative businesses that becomes applicable in real life,” she added.
For the first year, 50 business ideas will be selected from the total applications and they will get an intensive of one month training that includes entrepreneurshipand capacity building before it comes to juries to table their ideas.
Dawit Mulugeta, Manager of Innovative Jobs and Projects, said that the training helps those 50 selected business ideas to enable to develop feasible business proposal that may convince investors to invest on it.
On the process, 30 ideas that may contain 60 youths will be selected for the award and from the stated ideas 20 will be selected for six months incubation for business acceleration that will make them a company that shall be recognized as one of the major businesses in the country with potential job creations.
Those who may participate on the competition should have the age of 15 to 29 and mainly new businesses or those that do not extend more than 2 years on business activities, while the financial award seed money will be 200,000 birr for this year.
“The award may not be big but the major support will be the business acceleration that shall not be determined by money but it will garner major attention,” the Manager said.
Dawit said that business ideas that have innovative idea, scalability, shall create huge jobs in the coming ten year, and the business idea shall come up with solutions which are the major four pillars that focus on the competition that follows by different committee members selected from different organizations.
Dawit explained that to introduce the new program JCC has observed the experience of others.
The competition will be share on TV every week. MasterCard Foundation will provide the finance or seed money.