International Small Enterprise Programme provides specialist advice to small businesses
Summary
The International Small Enterprise Programme aims to stimulate job creation in small and medium-sized enterprises, particularly in emerging markets. ISEP will consolidate and develop ILO’s current work programme with entrepreneurs, large and small enterprises, governments, employer’s and worker’s organisations in a wide range of technical cooperation and action-oriented research activities. Enterprise specialists from the ILO assist 80 projects in 53 countries, as well as 26 regional and global projects.
The launch of an International Small Enterprise Programme (ISEP) reflects the growing importance of the role played by small and medium-sized enterprises in employment promotion and poverty alleviation. The ILC considers the general conditions needed to stimulate job creation in small and medium-sized enterprises, with a view to adopting a recommendation on the subject.
This programme was launched in mid-1998 and aims to consolidate and expand the ILO’s efforts to promote small enterprise development. It provides a new multidisciplinary and integrated framework for all ILO activities in this field. Under ISEP, small enterprises include micro-enterprises in both the formal and the informal sectors, as well as medium-sized enterprises and various forms of cooperative enterprises and business associations.
The main areas of the programme’s substantive work are: policy support for small enterprises; job quality; business development services; business management training; and mainstreaming a gender perspective in all ISEP activities. ISEP is the main ILO vehicle to help member States apply the provisions of the Job Creation in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Recommendation, 1998 (No. 189), adopted by the International Labour Conference in 1998, which deals with both qualitative and quantitative dimensions of small enterprise development. ISEP is based on the systematic and effective integration of standards-related issues — especially those that have a bearing on the qualitative dimension of the working environment — into business development programmes. This lends particular added value to the ILO’s contribution to work in this field.
One of the benefits of being organized as a global programme is that the impact and outreach will be maximized through the capitalization and dissemination functions of ISEP. Similarly, ISEP’s holistic perspective means that a multidisciplinary approach is built into working methods and is an essential ingredient for success. Its strategy to achieve this does not involve the multiplication of disciplines within the parent unit, but effective cooperation and collaboration with a range of other ILO programmes and units in which the complementary capacities reside.