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. ENHANCER grant schemes will be completely disbursed for entrepreneurs in order to scale up the capacities of the beneficiaries in determined sectors.
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 5000 entrepreneurs. Now we are conducting technical entrepreneurship trainings in 6 sectors.
Furthermore, matching events with participation of approximately 2000 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. We conducted many similar events for business world for entrepreneurs to meet investors as well as the SMEs that are working to scale up their business and to contribute economic growth via export by conducting events in corporation with Directorate General of Regional Development Agencies under Ministry of Industry and Trade to host global companies as buyers.
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 as well as 200 start up entrepreneurs and implementations of those projects are ongoing. 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 completed, 27 cooperative and unions of cooperatives in 11 implementation provinces are provisionally selected 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 ENHANCER Pro started to its implementation for our new achievements in socio economic development via supporting entrepreneurs; which comes as a continuity of the activities of ENHANCER.
Pınar Yapanoğlu
Portfolio Manager
Representation of ICMPD in Türkiye