ENHANCER PROJECT
It has been nearly 55 months since we started implementation of ENHANCER. We worked as 5 different teams under six different components day and night to be ready for an efficient and flawless implementation. 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 Local Common Use Facilities grant program and entrepreneurship trainings.
The grant scheme program for local common use facilities 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 2750 entrepreneurs. Now we are conducting technical entrepreneurship trainings in 6 sectors.
Furthermore, matching events 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.
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 SME grant scheme for job creation and capacity building will be launched soon for some of the provinces that are severely affected by the devastating earthquake in February 2023. 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