The Training Package on Gender and Entrepreneurship Together for Women in Enterprise (GET Ahead) aims to assist ILO partner organizations in promoting enterprise development amongst women and men in poverty who want to start or are already engaged in micro and small-scale businesses.

In Laos, the GET Ahead materials were field tested in March 2003. In 2004-2005, a number of Training of Trainers courses were organized, mostly targeting trainers at the provincial level. Over 2005 -2006, 340 entrepreneurs (250 women) were trained, under the umbrella of the ILO Project on Promoting Women’s Entrepreneurship Development and Gender Equality (WEDGE), with funding from IrishAid. Many of the trainees in Khammouane, Savannakhet and Champasak Provinces are also members of ILO-supported village banks.

There is a need to further strengthen the capacity of existing partner organizations at the national and provincial level, and at the same time to familiarize trainers from a wider range of partner organizations with the GET Ahead training package and methodology. This concerns specifically the Lao Disabled Women’s Development Center, which is an observer on the WEDGE Project Advisory Committee and which has indicated a strong need for its vocational training staff to have improved capacity to offer basic business skills to trainees. For this a Training of Trainers’ (TOT) Workshop on GET Ahead for Women in Enterprise took place in Vientiane, 13-17 December 2010. Trainers from the Lao’s Disabled Women’s Development Centre participated in this TOT and are now ready to organize two inclusive Get Ahead training workshops in two provinces where women with disabilities have returned after having received vocational training in Vientiane.