SME fund to create awareness on entrepreneurship in colleges

Muscat: To spread awareness on entrepreneurship among the Omani youth through its entrepreneurial campus programme across various colleges in Oman, Salalah College of Technology and SME Development Fund (SMEF) signed a memorandum of understanding recently.
Dr Mariam Al Awadh, dean of Salalah College of Technology and, Rapahel Parambi, chief executive officer of CEO, SME Development Fund signed the memorandum of understanding.
The SMEF ‘Entrepreneurial Campus Programme’ aims to help colleges and its students free of cost, while meeting the twin national objectives of creating entrepreneurial campuses and development of economic activity.
The SME Development Fund is targeted at growing the SME sector of the Omani economy. It operates the ‘Entrepreneurial Campus’ initiative, a broad array of programmers and resources that seeks to create and entrepreneurship culture in participating colleges by facilitating the running of exciting, high-impact entrepreneurship programmers on campus for students and potential entrepreneurs.
In addition to courses on entrepreneurship, SMEF also assist in the formation of a college entrepreneurship club (Al Namaa Club).
The Al Namaa Club is dedicated to encouraging, promoting and facilitating entrepreneurial activities among the Omani students in the colleges. The Al Namaa Club’s primary activities involve assisting in the establishment of entrepreneurial careers and linking club activities to entrepreneurial networking opportunities on and off campus, encourage the students to learn how to set up and manage professional and commercial activities and develop personally.
This initiative has been operational in 15 colleges and SMEF’s plan to take the meprogram across the nation covering all colleges by 2017.The fund supports entrepreneurs with accounting, software, monitoring and mentoring support.
KPMG have been signed on to exclusively provide this support to the first 50 SMEs. Its funding programme has sanctioned OMR9.3 million by way of financial support to 93 entrepreneurs. And under its ‘Legitimising’ initiative, it is working with various large corporate and government initiatives to support SMEs.