In January 2020, the S4C staff selected the 30 Students-Entrepreneurs from the 6 different targeted regions of the project (Kasserine, SidiBouzid, Kairouan, Monastir, Mahdia and Sousse)
Then, the 30 participants have followed a 3- month training on Design Thinking, Business Plan writing and Financial study.
During this phase, the program team has organized a series of mentoring and coaching session for the Student 4 Change program participants starting in the month of April 2019 and for a period of 7 months, the coaching has included 27 days of mentoring.
Since April 2020 and due to the spreading of the COVID-19 virus, the participants have followed several online trainings and conferences to improve their personal and professional skills while simultaneously following individual and group mentoring with our experts and mentors. The S4C staff have decided to organize all the online Individual coaching for the months of July, August and September, where our mentor meets with every participant individually and monitors the progress of their Business Plan.
Due to the outbreak of the corona virus, the Tunisian authorities announced on Wednesday, April 29, that the country’s ongoing lockdown measures to curb the spread of the virus. Consequently, we had to cancel any infield training session or activities. That’s why the S4C staff decided to organize a series of workshops of 10 online conferences covering the topics of Business Plan writing; like Business Creation, Digital Marketing, Graphic Design, etc…)
As a result, a mentoring report has been prepared to summarize all the subjects discussed during the accompanying meeting. Every meeting has an objective and work progress, add to that the needed work to do every next meeting(the idea is not clear) Where we had more than 26 days of mentoring with more than 90 mentoring sessions with most of our 30 students.
The mentoring sessions have directly and indirectly affected the participants and their entrepreneurship skills; It helped a lot of participants change and update their project ideas to react toward the pandemic and its impact on their projects.
Through the mentoring period, the S4C program settled a coordination role between the students. It helped them acknowledge their problems and their needs during this crisis and deliver it to next part: which is the public structures in charge of entrepreneurship in Tunisia, precisely our 8 partners in this project.
After the mentorship, Students were able to identify that most of their problems can be solved by so many services offered for free by public structures like “Business Center”, “National Agency of Employment and independent work”, which can impact their future entrepreneurship experience and also allow them to offer better advice to people around them such as friends, family, colleagues, etc…
The conferences that the participants have received helped them reformulate their Business ideas to fit with all the changes that affected the Market and the whole economic system in the world. This will allow them to strengthen their Businesses’ part in the market and add a whole chapter in their Business Plan called the “Risk Management” and “Risk Strategy”.