Menkop Teten Wants To Print 1 Million Entrepreneurs By The End Of 2024

Minister of Cooperatives and SMEs Teten Masduki. (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - The Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises (Kemenkop UKM) wants to produce one million well-established young entrepreneurs by the end of 2024.

"The creation of young entrepreneurs is established by collaborating with a number of business incubators in various universities. New entrepreneurs from among young people, especially students," said Minister of Cooperatives and SMEs Teten Masduki in Malang City, East Java, quoted from Antara, Wednesday, March 15.

"For now, what we are targeting are entrepreneurs from universities. We are working with business incubators on a number of campuses," said Teten.

Teten explained that one of the collaborations carried out by the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs was with Merdeka University Malang. The government wants to prepare MSME players who have an innovative model business and have competitive products.

According to him, the collaboration with business incubators on campuses in Indonesia will attract students who already have an innovative business and idea to start a business.

"We are working with incubators on campus to prepare students who have started to have businesses and have ideas to do business," he said.

He added that the students who have started to have the business will be given assistance by the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs to develop the existing business potential, including to the management of business licenses.

Then, he continued, in addition to providing assistance to develop this potential, the government will also open access to financing, including providing opportunities for expansion of market access.

"In this way, we can prepare new MSME players who have an innovative business model, and the products are also competitive. So that there is evolution in our MSMEs," he said.

According to him, current MSME actors must be able to produce innovative products in order to be able to compete with goods from abroad, considering that currently in the e-commerce sector, foreign-made products are still dominated.

"This is a challenge for domestic MSME players so that there is an improvement in product quality," he said.

He considered that currently many business ideas are quite good initiated by young potential entrepreneurs in the country. However, he admits that there are still a number of challenges such as access to financing for business development and capacity.

"I think a lot of people just need to develop their business, but there are also less innovative products, so the market is still small. This needs to be directed to target products where the market is quite wide and strong," he said.