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ကိုယ္ပိုင္လုပ္ငန္း စတင္လိုေသာ အသက္ ၁၇ ႏွစ္မွ ၂၅ ႏွစ္ လူငယ္မ်ားအတြက္…
စြန္႔ထြင္ဦးေဆာင္သင္တန္း ကို Opportunities NOW! တြင္တက္ေရာက္ပါ။

ေမလ ၆ ရက္ေန႔ စတင္မည္။
ေလွ်ာက္လႊာပိတ္ရက္ – ဧၿပီ ၂၆ ရက္

စာေတြ႔ ၆ ပတ္၊ လက္ေတြ႔ ၆ ပတ္ ႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးမတည္ေငြ ေဒၚလာ ၅၀၀ အထိ
၁) စီးပြားေရးသီအိုရီႏွင့္ က်င့္၀တ္
၂) ေငြစာရင္းႏွင့္ စာရင္းကိုင္
၃) ေစ်းကြက္စီးပြားေရး
၄) ၀န္ေဆာင္မႈ
၅) စီမံခန္႔ခြဲမႈ
၆) ကြန္ဗ်ဴတာ ကၽြမ္းက်င္မႈ (Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint)
 အခ်ိန္ – စာေတြ႔ ၆ ပတ္ ညေန ၁ – ၄ နာရီ
လက္ေတြ႔ ၆ ပတ္ မနက္ ၉ – ညေန ၅ နာရီအထိ

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March 9th, 16th, 23rd, 30th

Business Explorer 9 a.m. -12 p.m.

This is a class for those that want to start a business but don’t know where to begin.

You’ll Learn…….

What business should I start?

How do I write a business plan

How to take my ideas and implement then to start a business

Managing a business

Business Growth 1 – 4 p.m.

This is a class for those who already own a business but want expand.

You’ll Learn…….

How do I test new products

Where do I find expansion capital

How do I restructure my business for growth

How do I manage the transition from a small to medium size business

Come Join us for these course for 4 weeks.  They cost 25,000 kyat for the 4 sessions.  Please contact Mary Sanra for more information at sanra.40@gmail.com .

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Opportunities Now Entrepreneurship School (a subsidiary of Myanmar Business Answers Corp.) is partnering with Myanmar Ceramics Society and Twante pottery village, to create the Kalatha Pottery Shop in Yangon with a triple bottom line:

- Fund youth entrepreneurship program.
- Raise awareness about local eco-tourism.
- Support the Twante potters.

“Kaletha” means “Pottery” in the ancient Pyu Language spoken during the Pyu Dynasty which was the height of the pottery industry in Myanmar. During the 15th century Myanmar was sending pottery all around the world to places like Egypt (archaeological digs have shown Pyu Pottery found).

Sanctions have been lifted in Myanmar after several decades of Military Rule. This is literally the first time in decades that Myanmar has been open for international business. Myanmar has struggled over the years with sanctions from Western countries. One of the sectors that’s struggled is art. While other countries have outlets for their cultural art on the international market, Myanmar’s pottery market has deteriorated with the introduction of modern products that replace day to day use of pottery.

Opportunities NOW entrepreneurship program was launched this last year to train young people how to start businesses and provide micro-finance to launch those businesses. From this program youth have launched several businesses.

As part of our program youth intern at a local small business to get everyday experience. Over the next year several initiatives like this one will be started to employ youth in short term business experience before they launch their own small business.

We met Dr. Tyn and Myanmar Ceramics Society this past year when introduced by a tour operator who was trying to help Twante Village. They first approached us to help train their potters in entrepreneurship skills. We are still in the process of doing that first project with them. As we got to know Dr. Tyn and Twante Village better we fell in love with it. We began to dream of opening a pottery shop that featured Twante pottery. We talked with Dr. Tyn and he agreed it was a great idea. He as well was looking for an opportunity to connect Twante Village with tourists in Yangon as well as the international market. Thus was born the Kalatha Pottery Shop.

Now the remaining ingredient is your backing. Back this project at and not only are you getting some beautiful pottery, you are also investing in the future of young people in Myanmar.

Click Link Below:

http://pozible.com/myanmarpottery

Thanks for your support.

Ryan Russell

Executive Director

Opportunities NOW

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Going on now in partnership with Hamsa Hub and Myanmar Human Resources applications are beggining to be accepted for the “Business Plan Competition”. Application entry will close December 14th. Winners will be announced January 4th. Grants and Mentoring Services will begin January January 10th. The competition is for youth all over Myanmar to participate. Opportunites NOW, Hamsa Hub, and Myanmar Human Resources bring this competition to help engage young entrepreneurs and encourage them to take their creativity to the marketplace. Business Plans must be completed and turned in by December 14th. Prizes for the best business plans will be given by January15th.

Prizes
Grand Prize 4 lakh (Opportunities NOW)
First Runner-Up 2 lakh (Hamsa Hub)
Second Runner-Up 1 lakh (Hamsa Hub)

15 other finalists will get to take an entrepreneurship class from Opportunities NOW at a 50% discounted rate.

All winners will receive the chance to be mentored in Hamsa Hubs business incubation facility.

Opportunities NOW, Hamsa Hub, and Myanmar Human Resources will provide judges for choosing the best business plans. Each entity will do it’s best to prepare the winners for successful business startup.

Please send your completed business plans via e-mail to Opportunities Now Executive Director Ryan Russell at rrussell@youthhope.com or physically bring a paper copy to D. 1 Shwe Ingin Yeik Mon, Thuwanna, Thingangyun Township.

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Opportunities Now စီးပြားေရးသင္တန္းေက်ာင္း၏ ပထမဆုံးအတန္းခြဲကုိ ျပီးခဲ့ေသာ ေမလ ပထမအပတ္မွ ဇူလုိင္လထိ ေအာင္ျမင္စြာဖြင့္လွစ္သင္ၾကားေပးႏုိင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဆရာ၊ ဆရာမ ၅ဦး ျဖင့္ သင္တန္းသူ၊ သင္တန္းသား ၆ ဦးကုိသင္ၾကားပုိ႔ခ်ေပးႏုိင္ခဲ့သည္။ ဆရာ၊ ဆရာမမ်ား မွာ-

၁) ဆရာ M.ဒင္းဂ်ာ

၂) ဆရာ စုိင္းၾကည္စင္စုိး

၃) ဆရာ ေစာေစးထူး

၄) ဆရာ ေစာေဇာ္ထိန္လင္း ႏွင့္

၅) ဆရာမ ေမရီႏွင္းသဲ

တုိ႔ျဖစ္ၾကပါသည္။ စီးပြားေရးကုိလက္ေတြ႔အသုံးခ်လုပ္ကုိင္ေနေသာသူမ်ားျဖစ္သည့္ အားေလ်ာ္စြာ ေက်ာင္းသူ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားအတြက္အလြန္ပင္လက္ေတြ႔က်ၿပီး အေထာက္အကူျဖစ္သည့္ သင္ခန္းစာမ်ားကုိ သင္ၾကားေပးႏုိင္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။ ဆရာ၊ ဆရာမမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ၎တို့၏ အေတြ ့ အႀကံဳမ်ားႏွင့္ သင္ယူထားေသာ ပညာမ်ားကို  ဆရာစားမခ်န္ဘဲ ႀကိဳးႀကိဳးစားစားႏွင့္ ေစတနာအျပည့္ ျဖင့္ သင္ၾကားေပးခဲ့ ၾကသည္။

ေက်ာင္းသူ၊ ေက်ာင္းသား စုစုေပါင္း ၆ ဦး ျဖစ္ၿပီး ၃ ဦးမွာ ရ၀မ္၊ ၂ ဦးမွာ ေျမာင္စီး ႏွင့္ က်န္ ၁ ဦးမွာ ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဳးျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ၎တို ့သည္ သင္ခန္းစာမ်ားကို စိတ္ပါ၀င္စားစြာျဖင့္ သင္ယူေလ့လာခဲ့ၾက သည္။ သင္တန္းကာလမွာ ၃ လ ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း စာေတြ ့မွာ ၁ လ၊ လက္ေတြ ့မွာ ၂ လ ျဖစ္သည္။ စာေတြ႔သင္ယူျခင္း ၁ လတြင္ ေက်ာင္းသူ၊ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသည္ စာကို ေကာင္းမြန္စြာ သင္ယူႏိုင္ ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ လက္ေတြ ့၂ လတြင္လည္း အေတြ ့အႀကံဳကို ေက်ာင္းမွရွာထားေသာ အလုပ္သင္ေနရာ မ်ား၌ အားႀကိဳးမာန္တက္  ေလ့လာသင္ယူ ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ထိုကဲ့သို ့ သင္ယူခဲ့ျခင္း၏  အက်ိဳးရလဒ္အေန ျဖင့္ ၎တို႔မွာ ကိုယ္ပိုင္လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားစတင္ရန္ အသင့္ေနအထားသို႔ေရာက္ရွိေနခဲ့  ၾကပါသည္။ အခ်ိဳ ့မွာ လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား စတင္ေနၿပီျဖစ္ၿပီး အခ်ိဳ ႔မွာမႈ စတင္ရန္ ျပင္ဆင္ေနဆဲကာလ  ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုသူတို႔အတြက္ ေက်ာင္းမွ အင္မတန္ ဂုဏ္ယူဝမ္းေျမာက္မိပါသည္။ ထို ့ျပင္ ေအာင္ျမင္ ပါေစေၾကာင္းလည္း ဆုမြန္ေကာင္း ေတာင္းေပးလိုက္ပါသည္။

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Opportunities Now presented its 3-day seminar, “Mini-Business Seminar” from July 18^th to 20^th at the Tamwe Christian Center. The goals of the seminar were to develop a basic understanding of how to start a business, to raise the local youth’s interest in business and to help alleviate poverty in Myanmar.

A group of New Mission Systems International interns, Emily Bruso, Jason Bruso and Rachel Tien from the United States, gave speeches and lessons to Myanmar youth and small business owners. The interns not only talked about the fundamentals of starting a business, but they also covered many topics such as creating a business idea, writing a business plan, marketing, and financing for business growth.

According to Emily, more than 10 people attended each seminar. Most of them were middle-aged business owners and youth.  They were actively involved in discussions with the interns and each other. The attendees shared their experiences and concerns. The first seminar has ended with encouraging results for both the audience and Opportunities Now.

By Nway Ei Khine and Poe Oo

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YANGON – On June 11-12, Opportunities NOW business school hosted the Entrepreneurship & Small Business Development Seminar at the Chamber of Commerce in Yangon. The seminar was privileged with the honor of inviting guest speakers Tim Ghinn and Mark Plummer from Thailand to give training on entrepreneurship and business. The seminar was held in the hopes of further educating businessmen and women and empowering businesses with both employers and employees dedicated to developing their businesses even more. The two-day seminar brought together 80 businessmen and women around Yangon from different sectors which included, but was not limited to, the tourism industry and the medical field. Not only did the seminar attract experienced professionals from across different sectors, but it also drew in a number of young people seeking to develop their business skills or start entrepreneurial ventures.

In this two-day seminar, sessions were held on various topics which gave attendees strong business foundations, knowledge and skills to take away and build on. The first day consisted of four one-hour sessions which included the topics of: “Strong Business Foundations,” “Clarity in Concept: Know Your Business,” “Marketing: Customer Focus,” and “Five Levers to Double Profit.” During these four sessions, Tim Ghinn emphasized on the idea that “to build big, dig deep.” He taught on the different aspects of business which need to be given detail in order to create a strong and successful business. Along with his abundance of practical business knowledge, Mr. Ghinn also brought in his personal experience and wisdom as a seasoned entrepreneur with his advice to attendees to always “ask good questions” in every business situation. Day one concluded with the answer to the question that every businessperson asks: “How do I double my profit?” The key was a simple series of equations which Mr. Ghinn said would not fail to deliver profit –if calculated correctly.

The second day of the seminar opened with a session on “20 Entrepreneurial Qualities” through which every member in the audience was able to reflect and receive greater self-awareness about themselves as businesspeople.  They were also able to evaluate themselves on not only their strengths, but also their weakness which they needed to improve on. These top 20 entrepreneurial qualities included such as determination, salesmanship, curiosity, ambition, and optimism. This reflective session then led to the more practical sessions of learning how to create a business plan and, of course, money matters. In between these sessions, Mark Plummer also led a time of questions and answers and discussion between the people in attendance. Questions included such as: “What are the needs of the people?” and “What are you planning to do in the next week based on the lessons learned?” They led to thought-provoking responses from the different members of the audience, from both youths and experienced professionals. These responses showed a need for change and determination to create more successful and better businesses in Myanmar.

As a result of the Entrepreneurship & Small Business Development Seminar, there are high hopes for the 80 people to bring change to their workplaces and affect the society of Myanmar in phenomenal and visionary ways. As seen through the lens of business as mission, Mark Plummer stated, when “live improves for people” then there has been a great success.

Rachel Tien   Opportunities Now Intern

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Ice Cream is Nor Naw’s Passion

Nor Naw is Kachin and comes from Shwe Nyaung Pin, Moe Gok though he currently lives in North-Dagon with a host family. He is 22 years old. He has eight siblings and they are all with his father. His father is a hard-working farmer. Although his father is very hard-working, they are still poor and they have many uncertainties for family needs. So, he wants to become a business man when he is still young. He wasn’t sure about how to start a business. One day, he heard about the Opportunities NOW through his host family and he wanted to attend the school. Now, he is one of the students of Opportunities NOW. He is learning how to start a business and topics related to business. He believes that if he works hard, he’ll have success. He has a goal in his life which is to be an owner of a business. After he finishes the school, he’ll start an ice cream waffer business with his friends.

Nor Naw is one of 6 of our students currently in our Entrepreneurship Program. All six students are in their small business internships for June and July. They will finish their business plans and get micro-finance at the end of July. You can help us also by making a donation to Opportunities Now Entrepreneurship School through our donation page. The link will lead you to be able to do an online donation to the YouthHOPE Myanmar project which funds the school. We are currently running the school with funding for the first two years of operation. We hope to be fully funded this year and become self sustainable within 4 years through other trainings and business ventures. This is not an easy goal that we have and can use your encouragement and support. We are thankful for every dollar and encouraging e-mail that we get.

Blessings,

Ryan Russell
Director of YouthHOPE Myanmar
Executive Director Opportunities Now

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We had the school orientation yesterday May 7^th to explain about the program and A Shar lead the students in getting to know each other by asking lots of questions through an icebreaker game.  We had 7 students from North Dagone, Swe Pyi Thar, and Yankin townships here in Yangon.  I gave an opening speech on youth in Myanmar and the needs that the school meets.  Mary handed out and explained a test that helped students understand their temperament and behavioral styles which relate to business.  I followed that up by talking about understanding their skills and narrowing business ideas that most fit them.  They came up with being a shrimp and crab wholesaler, fixing electronics, making and selling fried snacks, grocery store, dried tofu seller, restaurant owner, and rice miller.  After all that, we had lunch, which ended our wonderful morning.

Around 1 p.m. Teacher Saw Say Htoo arrived and taught on Budgeting and Accounting.  We have planned too much material for the students to learn so we’ve had to make adjustments after only the first day of teaching.  Luckily we have really good teachers who understand the situation well enough to adjust as we go along.  We really think our program is very good but will have to be adjusted to tweak it to fit the students that we have.  We’ve been anticipating this day for the past 2 years.  Day 1 was a huge success and we are on the road to empowering these 7 youth to start their own businesses to impact their communities.

Ryan Russell

Executive Director of Opportunities NOW

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I found an article last year written by the online news source The Irrawady.  In the article it talked about Burma’s Education Crisis very accurate to what I’ve seen In Myanmar on my travels the past few years.  I’ve spent over a year in Myanmar over the past two and a half years and half researching the viability of the entrepreneurship school and creating partnerships to implement the plan that will take affect this May.  We have taken great length to understand the situation of education in Myanmar.  Below are some excerpts from the article that stood out to me.

“We used to have the best education in Asia,” a high school teacher told The Irrawaddy. “If we continue at this rate, our public education will forever be ruined, and I can’t see how the next generation will manage the country.”

In the early 20^th century Myanmar was considered the education capital of Asia.  There were great Universities but when the military came into power after the 1989 elections a lot of the Universities were shut down.  Since then the education system has suffered alot from lack of investment and reforms.

“Everyone just buys books in the market, which you can copy the assignments from. During the lessons we just sit there and listen to the teachers. There is no discussion.”

“The distant learning course is short term and there is very little contact between the students and their teachers,”

“It is unfair that we have to put up with the terrible state education, while the rich are enjoying the benefits of private education. It should be made equal so that young people can enjoy a quality education,”

“The cost of education is reported to be a major reason for non-attendance at school among children aged 5 to 10 years. In the age group of 11 to 15 years, the cost of supplementary items and the requirement to work are reasons for non-attendance.

Through quotes and interviews like this we have concluded that what is needed in Myanmar is a push by the church for affordable quality education and job creation.  In Myanmar education continues to deteriorate.  The U.N. reports that in 2007 73.9% of students who begin school will reach the final grade.  This is a misleading figure after looking at the Human Development Report from 2009 which states that Myanmar is 145^th in combined gross enrollment at 56.3%.  This means that out of the students of age to be in school only 56.3% of them attend.

The U.N. “outcome document” expresses their commitment to education.  Here is an excerpt from page 17, “Ensuring quality education and progression through the school system. This requires establishing learning-friendly schools and institutions; increasing the number of teachers and enhancing their quality through comprehensive policies that address issues of recruitment, training, retention, professional development, evaluation, employment and teaching conditions as

well as the status of teachers, through increased national capacity, and building more classrooms and improving the material conditions of school buildings and infrastructure and the quality and content of the curriculum, pedagogy and learning and teaching materials, harnessing the capabilities of information and communications technology (ICT) and the assessment of learning outcomes;”

Many things are changing in Myanmar because of the November 2010 elections.  We are excited to see this new government make the changes needed for development.  They have committed to moving forward with education reforms.  We hope to take part in addressing these specific needs that youth have in Myanmar through Opportunities Now Entrepreneurship program.  This is an opportunity to provide a service that is key to poverty alleviation.  Education and job creation is the beginning of transforming a country holistically.  Join us in this mission!