How NGOs Can Adopt the ILO/SIYB Programme to Create Real Entrepreneurship Impact

By Yashpal Sihag, ILO/SIYB Master Trainer

If you’ve worked in the NGO sector for any length of time, you’ve probably seen this pattern play out more times than you’d like to admit. A donor funds an entrepreneurship project. The NGO organizes a training. Youth, women, refugees, farmers or members of a self help group show up, sit through a few days of sessions, take photos with their certificates, and leave feeling genuinely inspired.

Then, a few months later, the same questions resurface. What business should I actually start? How do I know if my idea will work? How should I price what I’m selling? Why does it feel like money is always disappearing from the business? How do I even begin to grow?

I’ve sat across the table from enough entrepreneurs to know that motivation was never the missing ingredient. What’s usually missing is a system something that takes a person from “I have an idea” or “I have a skill” all the way through to “I am running a business that survives.” That gap is exactly where the ILO’s Start and Improve Your Business programme, known as SIYB, earns its keep.

SIYB isn’t a single workshop or a fixed curriculum that gets delivered the same way everywhere. It’s a flexible, field tested methodology that NGOs can shape around whatever community they’re working with whether that’s a youth livelihoods project, a women’s economic empowerment programme, a refugee settlement, or a network of farmer cooperatives. Having trained hundreds of trainers and facilitators across very different contexts, my advice to NGOs is always the same: stop treating SIYB as an event you run once and check off a logframe. Treat it as a pathway something that follows a person through the actual lifecycle of building a business.

What follows are fifteen ways I’ve seen NGOs put that thinking into practice.

1. Build a livelihood pathway, not a single training

Most livelihood projects begin with a technical skill tailoring, poultry rearing, food processing, soap making, beauty therapy, small scale farming. The assumption, often unspoken, is that once someone knows how to make or do something, the business side will sort itself out. It rarely does. Skill and enterprise are two different muscles, and an NGO that only trains the first one is setting people up to struggle with the second.

The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require sequencing. Before the technical skill is even taught, Generate Your Business Idea can help a participant figure out whether the idea they’ve settled on is actually worth pursuing, or whether something else in their environment is a better opportunity. Once they’ve chosen a direction, Start Your Business walks them through turning that idea into an actual plan what to sell, who will buy it, what it will cost to get going. And once the doors are open, Improve Your Business becomes the toolkit they return to again and again, for pricing, for keeping the books straight, for managing stock, for pushing sales higher. Strung together this way, SIYB stops being three separate trainings and becomes one continuous journey from “I have a skill” to “I can run a business.”

2. Use GYB to give youth a real idea, not a borrowed one

Ask any youth livelihoods officer about the biggest pattern they see, and many will tell you the same thing: young people are rarely short on energy or ambition, but they’re often short on a genuinely good idea. What happens instead is imitation. One person opens a phone accessories shop, and within months three more open right next door, because that’s the business everyone could see and nobody had to think too hard about.

Generate Your Business Idea exists precisely to interrupt that pattern. Rather than asking “what do you want to start,” it teaches youth to read their own environment to notice unmet needs, underused resources, gaps in the local market, waste that could be turned into a product, or imports that could just as easily be made or grown locally. The ideas that come out of this process tend to be sturdier, simply because they’re rooted in something real rather than copied from a neighbour. For TVET graduates, school leavers, and unemployed young people in particular, this single shift from copying to observing can be the difference between a business that lasts and one that closes within a year.

3. Make SYB the price of admission for grants and revolving funds

Plenty of NGOs hand out start up grants, toolkits, or seed capital as part of their livelihoods work. Plenty of that money also disappears within a few months, not because beneficiaries are careless, but because nobody ever asked them to think the business through before the cash arrived.

Requiring a Start Your Business plan before any funds are released changes the dynamic entirely. It forces a beneficiary to commit, on paper, to who their customers actually are, how they’ll reach them, what the start up costs will be, what monthly expenses look like, what sales they realistically expect, how cash will flow in and out, and exactly how the grant or loan will be used. None of this guarantees success nothing does but it does two useful things at once. It makes the support more accountable, and it gives the NGO a much clearer read on which beneficiaries have genuinely thought things through versus which ones are simply hoping for the best.

4. Bring IYB to entrepreneurs who are already running something

Not every beneficiary an NGO works with needs to be talked into starting a business plenty are already running one, often for years. What they’re short on isn’t motivation; it’s systems. This is exactly the gap Improve Your Business is built to close, and it works best when it’s organized around the specific problem an entrepreneur is facing rather than delivered as a generic course.

If a trader keeps losing stock to spoilage or theft, Buying and Stock Control is the module that matters. If a business has plenty of sales but somehow no profit at the end of the month, Costing usually reveals why. If an entrepreneur genuinely doesn’t know where their money goes, Record Keeping fixes that blind spot. Low sales point toward Marketing; a business that feels chaotic and reactive benefits from Planning for Your Business; and where staff aren’t pulling their weight, People and Productivity gives the entrepreneur language and tools to address it. The point is to diagnose first and prescribe second problem based training, not a one size fits all module.

5. Adapt the delivery, not the substance, for women’s economic empowerment

Women entrepreneurs are rarely working with a blank schedule. Most are running a business alongside childcare, household responsibilities, and a long list of social expectations that men in the same programme simply don’t carry in the same way. If an NGO delivers SIYB to women exactly as it would to anyone else full day sessions, training centres far from home, no consideration for who’s watching the children attendance and engagement will suffer, no matter how good the content is.

The content of SIYB doesn’t need to change for this. What needs to change is the delivery: shorter sessions spread across more days, training held within the community rather than requiring travel, arrangements that make it possible to bring children along, group exercises that build solidarity rather than competition, case studies featuring women entrepreneurs from similar backgrounds, simplified record books that don’t assume strong literacy, links to existing savings groups, and mentorship circles that continue after the formal training ends. None of this dilutes SIYB if anything, it makes the same rigorous content land with people who would otherwise have been locked out of it by logistics alone.

6. Pair SIYB with self help groups and village savings groups

Self help groups and village savings and loan associations already have something many entrepreneurship programmes struggle to build from scratch: trust, discipline, and a working group structure. What they often lack is the business planning and management know how to put their pooled resources to good use.

SIYB slots neatly into that existing structure. GYB helps the group think through what enterprises individual or shared actually make sense given their resources and local market. SYB gives members a plan to bring to the group before they borrow from the fund, rather than borrowing first and figuring out the business afterward. And IYB strengthens the businesses that members are already running with the group’s capital. The effect is protective as much as developmental: when members borrow against a real plan instead of a hope, the group’s fund is far less likely to be eroded by businesses that were never going to work.

7. Localize SIYB for refugee and host community livelihoods

Refugee settings change the rules of the game. Markets are often restricted, movement can be limited, capital is scarce, and something as basic as documentation can stand between a person and a functioning business. Entrepreneurship in this context isn’t really a career choice it’s frequently the only viable path to dignity and self reliance available to someone whose options have been narrowed by displacement.

Delivering standard SIYB content into this context without adaptation tends to fall flat. What works better is grounding every example in the camp’s actual economy: low investment business models that don’t require capital nobody has, deliberate links to host community markets so refugee businesses aren’t trapped selling only to other refugees, simplified financial planning that doesn’t assume access to formal banking, group based coaching where movement is restricted, and direct connections to whatever savings groups, microfinance, or cash based assistance already exist in the setting. Crucially, this only works with consistent follow up after the formal training a single visit or two, not a one off event. Done this way, SIYB becomes less a curriculum and more a lifeline.

8. Turn farmers into agribusiness operators, not just producers

A great deal of agricultural training focuses entirely on production how to grow more, raise healthier livestock, increase yield. What’s frequently missing is the business lens: how to cost a harvest properly, how to negotiate price instead of accepting whatever the first buyer offers, how to keep records that actually mean something, how to plan cash flow across a season that has highs and lows built into it.

This is where SIYB, recontextualized around farming examples, adds real value. Costing applies just as well to poultry, dairy, vegetables, fish farming, or beekeeping as it does to a retail shop. Marketing translates into aggregation, packaging, and building lasting relationships with buyers rather than chasing one off sales. Record Keeping becomes a tool for tracking inputs, labour, sales, and most importantly actual profit, which many farmers are surprised to discover is thinner than they assumed. Planning helps farmers map cash flow against the seasons and loan repayment schedules instead of being caught off guard by them. The shift, in short, is from seeing farming purely as a production activity to managing it as the business it actually is.

9. Train your own staff as SIYB trainers, not just your beneficiaries

Of everything on this list, this is probably the one with the highest long term payoff and the one most NGOs underinvest in. Relying on external consultants for every round of business training is expensive, and worse, it’s inconsistent different consultants bring different quality, different emphasis, sometimes different versions of the same content.

The ILO’s Training of Trainers course exists to fix exactly this. When field officers, livelihood officers, and enterprise development staff go through ToT themselves, they come out able to deliver SIYB’s participatory methodology directly not as a watered down imitation, but as genuinely competent facilitation. From there, the NGO can roll SIYB out across every project, branch, and community it works in in a way that’s both cheaper and more consistent than constantly bringing in outside trainers. If there’s one piece of advice I repeat most often to NGO leadership, it’s this: don’t think about a single training event. Build a trainer pool inside your own organization. That’s what makes SIYB sustainable rather than a recurring line item in every new grant proposal.

10. Don’t let training end where the real work begins

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about adult learning in general, not just entrepreneurship: a person can understand record keeping perfectly well in a classroom and still not do it once they’re back in their shop, simply because the habit hasn’t been built yet. The same goes for a business plan written during a workshop it often takes someone reviewing it, asking hard questions, and checking back in before the entrepreneur trusts it enough to actually act on it.

This is why follow up isn’t an optional extra to SIYB it’s where most of the real change actually happens. A practical follow up system might include a visit thirty days after training, group coaching sixty days in, a review of business records at the ninety day mark, ongoing peer learning meetings, a WhatsApp support group for quick questions, mentorship from established local business owners, sessions focused on market linkages, and support preparing entrepreneurs to approach lenders. None of this needs to be expensive or elaborate. It just needs to exist, because training without follow up is, more often than not, training that fades.

11. Use SIYB to find out who’s actually ready

NGOs are constantly in the position of having to choose: who gets the toolkit, who gets into the incubator, who gets the market linkage opportunity. The honest answer is that this is hard to judge from a five minute conversation or an application form, and a lot of support ends up going to people who simply present well rather than people who are genuinely prepared.

SIYB tools can sharpen that selection process considerably. Before committing resources, an NGO can ask candidates to work through a business idea screening exercise, a simple market study, a basic business plan, a start up cost calculation, a cash flow projection, and an action plan. People who can’t get through these exercises with any seriousness are telling you something important before you’ve spent a shilling on them. People who can are usually the ones worth backing.

12. Bring SIYB into the digital age

Even the smallest micro enterprise today operates in a world that includes mobile money, WhatsApp Business, and social media whether the entrepreneur has formally adopted these tools or not. Leaving digital skills out of entrepreneurship training increasingly means leaving out a chunk of what running a modern business actually requires.

The pairing is natural. After SYB, a session on promoting the new business online rounds out the launch. After the IYB Marketing module, helping entrepreneurs set up a Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp Business page turns theory into something tangible they can point to by the end of the day. After Record Keeping, introducing a simple mobile based record tool gives literate and semi literate entrepreneurs alike a lighter alternative to paper ledgers. After Planning, weekly digital sales tracking keeps the planning habit alive long after the workshop ends. None of this replaces SIYB’s core content it simply keeps it current.

13. Offer SIYB as a structured service to associations and chambers

Plenty of NGOs work alongside market associations, women traders’ groups, and local chambers of commerce networks that already contain working entrepreneurs, but where members rarely get access to structured, ongoing capacity building.

SIYB can be offered as exactly that a member service rather than a one off project activity. Market traders benefit most from IYB’s Record Keeping and Costing modules. Small manufacturers tend to need Marketing and Productivity. Members still in the start up phase are well served by SYB, while more established, growth minded members can be introduced to Expand Your Business. Delivered this way, SIYB doesn’t just build individual capacity it gives the association or chamber something concrete and valuable to offer its members, which in turn strengthens the institution itself.

14. Run sector specific SIYB clinics instead of generic workshops

There’s a meaningful difference between a general business training and one where every example, case study, and discussion is drawn from the participant’s own sector. The tools in SIYB don’t change from one clinic to the next, but the relevance certainly does.

An NGO running multiple livelihood streams can organize SIYB clinics built specifically around tailoring businesses, food vendors, poultry farmers, salon owners, small retailers, boda boda operators, digital freelancers, artisans, waste recycling entrepreneurs, or home based women’s enterprises to name a few. A tailor working through a costing exercise framed around fabric, thread, and machine time will engage with it very differently than if the same exercise used a generic retail example. The specificity is what makes the learning stick.

15. Track business progress, not just attendance

Donors increasingly want to know more than how many people sat through a training. They want to know how many businesses actually started, how many improved their sales, how many created jobs, how many started keeping proper records, and how many went on to access finance. Most NGOs, if they’re honest, are better equipped to report the first kind of number than the second.

SIYB makes the second kind of reporting realistic. Once it’s embedded as a system rather than an event, NGOs can track concrete indicators: business ideas generated, business plans completed, businesses actually launched, increases in sales, improvements in record keeping practice, jobs created, loans or grants successfully accessed, new customers gained, new products introduced, and reductions in stock loss. This is the shift from activity based reporting “we trained 200 people” to enterprise based reporting “of those 200 people, 140 started a business and 90 grew their sales within six months.” It’s a harder story to build, but it’s the one that actually demonstrates impact.

SIYB works best as a system, not an event

If there’s one idea I’d want every NGO programme manager to walk away with, it’s this: the real power of SIYB was never in the workshop itself. It’s in using SIYB as a structured pathway that carries a person through the whole arc of becoming an entrepreneur from confusion to a real business idea, from idea to a workable plan, from plan to an actual start up, from start up to steady improvement, and eventually from improvement to genuine growth.

That, to me, is the difference between giving someone hope for a single afternoon and giving them the tools, systems, confidence, and ongoing support to build something that survives and, ideally, something that goes on to create opportunities for other people too. As an ILO/SIYB Master Trainer, that’s the standard I try to hold NGOs, TVET institutions, chambers, and development organizations to whenever we sit down to adapt this methodology to their particular context: keep the practical strength of SIYB intact, and let everything else bend to fit the community you’re actually serving.