Youth enjoy new entrepreneurship opportunities
By Fuad Guliyev
Azerbaijan is exploring new ways to tackle the economic difficulties and all new ideas are welcome.
Youth Inc. Business Incubation Center is a youth entrepreneurship program proposed by the youth of the nation to the president of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev during the meeting dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of the Youth Forum. It is founded by the Coca Cola, Ministry of Youth and Sports, as well as a public organization named Civil Society Debate.
According to the program manager Mushvig Hasanov Youth Inc. has been active in this field since its foundation in 2013. Primary goal of the organization is to support the young entrepreneurs, new firms in high technology industries, boost start ups and enable technology transfer. This project is part of the “Youth of the Azerbaijan in 2011-2015” State Program. During last 3 years Youth Inc. trained well over 5,000 young entrepreneurs.
President Ilham Aliyev appraised the activities of Youth Inc. and added that so far a large amount of long term loans, worth of 1.7 billion manats (around $1 billion) were lent to the entrepreneurs and another 250 million manats ($157 million) are planned to be lent. The president also added that such organization of young entrepreneurs is welcome and currently business incubators are being created in Baku and regions. Young entrepreneurs are essential part of the development of many different aspects of the economy of Azerbaijan.
Further developing the idea, Farhad Hajiyev, the executive director of the Youth Fund, added that to this date Fund supported 2.333 business projects both in Baku and the regions.
Youth entrepreneurship is especially important in the perspective of the need for stressing taxes as an important source of budget revenue in the period of shrinking oil and gas revenues.
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