♦ Start-Up Nation 2024 aims to put 30,000 Romanians through entrepreneurship courses, eventually financing around 7,700 projects.
The 2024 edition of the Start-Up Nation program comes with significant changes, starting from the way the program is financed and up to the categories of possible beneficiaries to whom it is addressed, according to the project put out for public consultation, explained Ana Morun, the founder of the consultancy Inspire Funds, in the ZF Investiți în România! show, made in partnership with CEC Bank.
“Being a program made on the Education and Employment Program, Start-Up Nation 2024 is a social program and it is normal to address more to certain disadvantaged categories, no longer a program financed by government funds as it was until now”. The draft GEO for the approval of Start-Up Nation 2024 was put up for public consultation on April 23 for a period of 10 days. According to it, young people aged between 18 and 35 can apply for financing of around 50,000 euros, with 10% self-financing, regardless of whether they are employed or not.
At the same time, the program run by the Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism is aimed at people looking for a job, the unemployed, the long-term unemployed, inactive people, former prisoners or people from disadvantaged groups.
The consultants liken the project to the POCU programs (Human Capital Operational Program), which were aimed especially at disadvantaged people and which came with a strong component of training courses.
“The first step in the program is to take an entrepreneurship course that you can attend for free. (…) Next comes the selection of authorized providers of professional training. We still don’t know what the conditions will be, who the suppliers will be, in May they will be chosen and the procedure will be published on the ministry’s website”.
Start-Up Nation 2024 aims to put 30,000 Romanians through entrepreneurship courses, eventually financing around 7,700 projects. The program is structured on two pillars, the first of which has a budget of over 295.7 million euros.
“Pillar 1 is aimed at young people between 18 and 30 years old. They estimated that around 25,000 young people will participate in entrepreneurship courses, of which only 5,200 will receive financing to open a business, that is, around 20% of those who participate”.
If the first pillar refers to young people, the second pillar refers to disadvantaged people from the eligible categories and has a budget of over 150.4 million euros.
“Pillar 2 is addressed to disadvantaged people and young people between the ages of 30 and 35, where it is estimated that around 4,600 people will participate in courses and about 2,500 will receive funding, so more than half”.
It remains to be seen who will be the “authorized suppliers” for the entrepreneurship courses and how the ministry will select them. These courses will be free for the participants and will be settled by the ministry directly to the training companies after the completion of the courses by the beneficiaries.
Until then, Ana Morun sounds the alarm about the consulting firms for attracting European funds that have already unjustifiably started asking clients for advances to submit Start-Up Nation 2024 projects.
“I received quite a few calls from clients who said that consulting firms are already calling them to sign contracts because the program was launched, they asked them for 1,000-2,000 euros in advance to write the project. (…) Don’t start giving money to consultants as an advance”.
In addition to the fact that the program is still at the draft stage put out for public consultation, which means that there could be changes to it, it is not clear whether there will really be a need for consulting firms with European funds in the context in which they will already exist entrepreneurship course providers.
“I believe that whoever will support the professional training courses will be able to guide the future applicants to make their business plan. I don’t know if the consulting firms will have a very big role in this program, it will be rather the training firms”.
