350 Entrepreneurship Activities Nationwide By 42 Malaysian Social Entrepreneur Clubs

The PIDs have sent us a summary of 350 activities they have planned throughout the country during "the Week" !

Wow !

Actually they have been sending the details to us throughout last week!

Our point man in Warisan Global, Mr Azul (seen in the photograph here with his groovy sunglasses posing in front of a PID with a Supervisor of the PID) has been instrumental in helping shape and catalyzing these activities !

Azul is the Head of Telecentre Excellence in Warisan Global. He hails from Indonesia and used to work for the UNDP.

A quick intro:

The Ministry of Energy Water & Communications Malaysia (KTAK) manages or has arranged connectivity through its Universal Services Program to about a thousand plus telecentres Nationwide.

42 of these telecentres are called PIDs or Pusat Internet Desa (Rural Internet Centres). These telecentres are located in every state in Malaysia except the Federal Territory.

Apart from offering ICT trainings to its surrounding communities to help them embrace ICT as part of the Malaysian Government's efforts to Bridge the Digital Divide, the PIDs also currently are shaping up to operate as Social Enterprises. This is part of the Sustainability program.

In their role as a Social Enterprise, the PIDs offer various value added services such as providing the rural and semi rural communities an avenue through its portal to interact and benefit from Government services, to help them trade and also help members of the community to undergo various distance learning programs.

As a move towards creating a sustainable telecentre (both in terms of financial and user sustainability) each of these telecentres has recently set up Social Entrepreneur clubs (SE Clubs)

The objective of the SE Clubs is to bring all stakeholders within the radar of the PIDs and also to connect communities from one PID location to others nationwide to facilitate trade and knowledge sharing.

These SE Clubs have planned what we call Community Social Entrepreneur Activities throughout the country as part of the Global Entrepreneurship week activities.

A summary of these activities are:

• exhibition and bazar of products and services by the local entrepreneurs;
• promotion and recruitment of PID's Social Entrepreneurs Club (SE Club);
• sharing sessions on business activities, products development, success stories, and entrepreneurship's best practices by local entrepreneurs;
• site visits to SE Club members locations and to other successful businesses;
• networking sessions with various key stakeholders to develop connections with local entrepreneurs;
• and various workshops and trainings for the SE Club Members and the public on entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship opportunities, and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
  
• Some PIDs will conduct trainings on various social networking tools or Web 2.0 such as Facebook, Flickr, and Blogging and some other PIDs will conduct basic computer and internet trainings for entrepreneurs.

All these activities will be uploaded on the unleashingideas site as we go along. Some will be uploaded by the PIDs and some by us to help them as the internet connection in some of these areas are not as fast.

We look forward to a "thousand flowers" bloom during the Week.

Thank you to the Ministry of Energy Water & Communications, Malaysia for their support for "the Week" and congrats to the PIDs for their effort to promote entrepreneurship during the GEW Week.

A GRASSROOTS SUPPORT FOR 'THE WEEK" FROM MALAYSIA !