Helping entrepreneurs grow their enterprises as part of a flourishing business community
As Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth-most-populous country, Indonesia has an impressive record of growth. Between 1999 and 2018 the country cut its poverty rate by more than half, to just under ten percent. A key contributor of that growth has been the country’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — which account for nearly 97 percent of Indonesia’s domestic employment and 56 percent of its total business investment. Despite this, there have been relatively few resources to help Indonesian entrepreneurs think about how to sustainably grow their businesses as part of a flourishing broader business community.
A newly launched two-year program, led by the international entrepreneurship organization Transformational Business Network (TBN) and supported with $200,000 in funding from the John Templeton Foundation, will help equip dozens of Indonesian entrepreneurs to purposefully grow their businesses. TBN will identify promising entrepreneurs and provide training and coaching to help them responsibly scale their businesses, potentially creating hundreds of jobs and improving the lives of tens of thousands of low-income people who benefit from the ripple effects of positive economic development.
The Indonesia project builds on TBN’s record of success mentoring entrepreneurs in East Africa, where the organization recently helped accelerate dozens of small enterprises in Kenya and Ethiopia. Since its founding in 2003, TBN has enabled 192 entrepreneurs to scale their enterprises, mobilizing $70 million in capital in the process.
FREE MARKET VIRTUES
In Indonesia, TBN’s training curriculum will guide small business owners towards better understanding of how shared business values like cooperation, competition, fairness, and integrity benefit both individual enterprises and the business community as a whole. Entrepreneurs are coached on how to make their enterprises “investor-ready,” while TBN helps connect them with policy makers, philanthropists, and development experts as well as potential investors.
“TBN’s approach offers a unique roadmap for economic growth that helps all levels of society by emphasizing both free markets and virtuous business practices,” says Amy Proulx, the John Templeton Foundation’s Program Officer for Individual Freedom and Free Markets. “With their proven record in East Africa, TBN are able to scout out promising entrepreneurs and provide them with resources to develop their businesses well, encouraging the kind of deliberate and sustainable growth that helps communities and countries thrive.”
STILL CURIOUS?
Learn more about Transformational Business Network International.
