2018-04-12
Greetings!
I welcome young farmers!
It is a very exciting day for me because today we are launching a very important program.
Allow me to state that the engagement of youths in our country's building is extremely important. Our country needs bold ideas, daring decisions, and your age is the best age for it.
We need unconventional ideas, and we welcome the creation of different platforms enabling youths to organize and deliver their opinions to the authorities, to ensure their involvement in governance, which is extremely important to us.
Actually, everything that we do, including this program, is designed to enable young people to start their own businesses and fulfil their potential. It is very important to us that today we are launching a program targeting this very niche.
The program targets persons 18-40 years of age with active ideas, especially in the regions, and it is very important to ensure that the center of economic development's mass be distributed among different regions of the country. This is why farmers' engagement in this program is accentuated, and as far as I now, its 20% is allocated to nonagricultural businesses. Still, incentives will target the regions heavily.
We have taken more than one step to give young people greater opportunities for fulfilling their potential. It is very important to us that the ongoing education reform aims to provide youths with the knowledge and experience that the country needs most.
We do not need a system that produces unemployed people every year, that is, people specializing in professions demanded in the country for a lesser extent. The steps we are taking today are about emphasis on quality, on one hand, in other words, enhancing quality in schools of higher education. On the other hand, it is about applying certain regulatory mechanisms to highly demanded professions in the country, especially technical professions, technology experts in the rural areas, and so on. Of course, developing the system is equally important, and the state pays special attention to it.
Besides professional education, the state has taken numerous steps to provide startups, novice entrepreneurs, with special conditions. This is why Startup Georgia, a project financing startup businesses, was launched, and we have seen many successful projects under this financing. Similarly, the same goal is pursued by the Produce in Georgia program and its numerous components, especially the directions of manufacturing, Georgian cinematography's development, small hotel, as well as agricultural programs, of course, such as Plant the Future, the Agro Credit Program, the program for the development of refrigeration and warehouse farming, and others, which directly aim to improve the standards of living in the rural areas, and that is one task our Government prioritizes.
Today, we are launching the Young Entrepreneur project, a crucially important wave of the development of small and startup enterprises. The Government of Denmark and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) assisted the Government of Georgia in the development of this program. I would like to thank them for their invaluable help.
The program involves incentives for startup entrepreneurs 18-40 years of age, including 40% grants, consultative assistance, and the remaining financing entrepreneurs can attract using the programs I listed earlier.
Thus, a full circle is created, and its different components are designed to assist startup and small entrepreneurs in different ways.
I strongly believe that this program will prove tremendous success.
In addition, I would like to inform you that the Government and the economic team are actively working to promote capital injections for SMEs, those commercially viable but lacking in capital, that is, participation. We are working on this direction as well, which will turn out to be yet another successful wave.
All these projects put in place an environment, an ecosystem, in which youths will be promoted in every way, and they will have all necessary conditions to become employers as opposed to employees.
I have nothing against those employed, employees, but our country is in extreme need of considerable creative energy that will bring about totally different dynamics in our country's economic development.
I would like to thank the Ministry of Agriculture and Levan Davitashvili personally, along with the Projects Management Agency, as support for this project is ensured under this agency.
First of all, I would like to wish success to you, our young people! Trust me, by looking at you, and seeing your energy, we draw necessary energy enabling us to take more steps and to put in place the rapidly growing and dynamic economy which will advance our country to a brand new qualitative level of development.
Thank you very much!
Please accept my wishes for success!