News/Events

A WDI training session as part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative.

WDI’s Education Initiative is launching the Entrepreneurship Development Center for Emerging Markets (EDC), harnessing 15 years of experience helping entrepreneurs in emerging markets grow their ventures through education, training and consulting.

The new center will strengthen WDI’s long-established commitment to delivering top-notch entrepreneurship education and also highlight expanded offerings and services available to potential partners. The EDC also features a robust resource center of articles, blog posts, case studies, and learning tools.

Also making its debut along with the EDC is the Education Initiative’s proprietary 6M Entrepreneurship Development Model which outlines the six “M’s” — mindset, markets, money, mechanisms, management, mentorship — that WDI uses to design and deliver entrepreneurship education. WDI combines the latest, best practices with innovative pedagogy and learning tools, and then works with regional experts in emerging markets to localize content. The result is a program that is globally applicable and culturally relevant to the partner.  

Amy Gillett, vice president of the Education Initiative, said the EDC’s launch is very timely.

“Emerging market countries around the globe are looking for ways to grow and diversify their economies,” she said. “Many of these countries also suffer from high unemployment. We believe entrepreneurship is an effective solution. However, to succeed, entrepreneurs need the proper training, support, and resources and the countries need to create effective ecosystems. The EDC is set up to support these needs.”

For the past 15 years, WDI’s Education Initiative has delivered entrepreneurship training programs in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America to owners and managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises.

For example, WDI trained more than 100 entrepreneurs from throughout Morocco under a grant from the U.S. State Department. As part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative, WDI successfully trained 330 women entrepreneurs in Rwanda.

And WDI demonstrated its thought leadership on entrepreneurship education when it convened academics and practitioners at the University of Michigan for the 2011 “Global Summit on Educating Entrepreneurs,” a global conference on how to plan, deliver, and assess world-class entrepreneurship training programs in emerging markets.

Learn more about the Education Initiative in the video below.

Gillett said the Education Initiative’s long history of aiding entrepreneurs makes WDI uniquely qualified to offer successful and rewarding entrepreneurship programs.

“After successfully training hundreds of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship instructors over the past two decades, we are well-positioned to serve this role,” Gillett said. “We are excited to launch the Entrepreneurship Development Center and expand our entrepreneurship development efforts.”