ENHANCER PROJECT
As ENHANCER Project Team, we worked day and night as 5 teams under 6 components to ensure an efficient and flawless implementation period; which we are in the final quarter. By the 55th month of our project, We accomplished to mobilise a total value of 12.7 million Euros worth of grants out of 17 million Euros of total grant schemes to enhance the entrepreneurship ecosystem in 11 implementation provinces for the entrepreneurs, SMEs and NGOs.
These are end results of our first grant program for Local Common Use Facilities; which is unique under its own concept. As ENHANCER Team, we are not only financing, monitoring and evaluating. We have done an initial need assessment of our grantee organizations and we will be feeding in with expert advice on the subjects of identification.
We developed and built our own entrepreneurship training program and succeeded in graduating approximately 3400 entrepreneurs. Now we are conducting technical entrepreneurship trainings in 6 sectors.
Furthermore, matching events with participation of approximately 1000 beneficiaries will continue with a diverse set of events and value private sector mobilization, seed capital, crowdfunding, meet the buyers and B2B events. Within this scope; we conducted an Animation Hackathon on 30 June 2024 in Valley of Informatics, Gebze; as the Gaming Hackathon we conducted in 2023. Another event of this series will be conducted on 5th of November in Gaziantep with the collaboration of Silkroutes Regional Development Agency, Gaziantep Chamber of Commerce and Gaziantep Chamber of Industry.
I am also very pleased that we have completed the evaluations of 2 new grant programs for start-ups and cooperatives with a total budget over 5 million Euros and their contracting phase of 16 successful project proposals have been completed and implementations of those project have started. Number of total cooperative beneficiaries have increased to 24 with the beneficiaries of the new grant scheme. I am glad to announce another Cooperative grant scheme for job creation and capacity building has been launched on 23 September 2024 for some of the provinces that are severely affected by the devastating earthquake in February 2023. That call for proposals which applications are still on-going, is aiming to award grants to 25 cooperative and unions of cooperatives in 11 implementation provinces with a total amount of 2.7 million Euros.
It is one of our great achievements to see the continuous capacity building and growth of formal employment by our 64 beneficiaries of the first SME grant scheme as well.
Last but not least, I am glad to announce the contracting of ENHANCER Pro which comes as a continuity of the activities of ENHANCER, which will start in December 2024.
Pınar Yapanoğlu
Portfolio Manager
Representation of ICMPD in Türkiye