...WISE

...just attended a 2-day convention on women in social enterprise (wise)...a joint project with ministry of higher education (mohe) and amanah ikhtiar malaysia (aim)...we were appointed as the secretariat to oversee the running of the program...aim is an agency established to eradicate poverty in malaysia whereby women are given a small loan to start business...so far aim has eradiacted more than 300,000 families out of poverty...glad that wise has turned out to be a very successful project...it is a win-win project that benefit both parties, students/lecturers involved and aim's friends (sahabat)...students learn from their adopted families about business and the families learn from the students the correct way of doing business...they learn cash/financial management, marketing etc...the project involves about 500 students from various HEIs and about 250 aim's friends/businesses...on the second day of the convention, students and lecturers were given the opportunity to share their experiences and to give feedbacks and suggestions to improve wise next project...in my closing speech I said that I'm happy to hear all the experiences and comments especially the negative ones...to me the more problems the students have or faced during the program the happier I am...it means that we have achieved the main objective of the program, to instill entrepreneurial spirit among the student...innovative & breakthrough thinking, quick decision making, use of common sense, self confidence, taking risks & opportunities etc...I asked all participants to reflect (positively) their experiences...how they adapt to a different environment, how they react and respond to the problems/issues, what decisions have they made, is it a good one or a bad one, what lessons have they learned from it...those are the lessons that they won't get from the classroom...they won't learn much from a perfect system...that's the noble idea of the program anyway...
Sent from my Blackberry