i participated in ARUN social business contest held in Cambodia on Aug 4-10.
there were two purpose to attend this;
1) to experience to plan social business
2) to make it help to decide future research area; business or agricultural economy?
and each result for them is like this
1) throughout this program especially last 3days we deeply engaged in planning, i strongly felt I CAN BE A SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR.
it seems to be easier than i expected. it is always bad point of me to evaluate my value worse and make everything hard to attain. however, this experience turned the foolish thinking and encouraged me to have self confidence.
there are two reasons that i think i can be.
first of all, there are too many problems in Cambodia that even three days research conducted by students revealed a lot, at least 5 for each group. it seems rather easier to find out problem or people in need and to help them than japan.
secondly, there are numerous entrepreneurs who succeed in Cambodia and enjoy their business, i mean there life. they are so impressive and admirable for me. and i feel sympathy with them than Japanese office workers. doesn't it mean that i am one of 'this side' of people?
so my trial to attend biz con and use it to build my career was successfully achieved.
2) then, how about my major?
to say honestly, i prefer urban business than rural business because i was grown in metropolitan Tokyo!
however, as a research point of view, it was really interesting to go and see around rural area, the life style of farmers and how farmers cooperative works. i was clearly excited at many things there and can't help telling it to my peers in class because it was interesting.
so one result is this:
- i should study rural development especially agricultural economy.
i think i can't completely engage in rural matters all alone if i started business.
but i still believe that i can work there if i work with urban youth, who has same ambitions with me.
i met a lot of such students this time and i deeply believe them that we share a same goal.
what i wanna say is i wanna keep studying rural development.
these were my purpose and achievement.
of course there are numerous extra learnings from this program.
probably biggest thing is 'friendship'.
it is easy to say we are friends, but this time it literally truely means that
because i've never seen students group like them, who share same goal,
who are serious to work on that and who are actually working on them in some ways.
it was so natural that we talked about problems in Cambodia even at the first day we met.
they are all inspiring and encouraging still now through Facebook.
Also it was first time that i could so deeply believe in my team in biz con.
that may be because that we spend whole three days together and
shared all difficulties and happy time related to our plan.
also there another thing but i stop writing what i learned here
because these three are the most important things.
finally, i'll introduce what i planned there.
our service is to help students who are economically challenged, have inequality in opportunity and from rural area to get internship or volunteer chances which follows to their future career.
in particular, we provide three services.
1) Web based platform 'intervo' (was the name): it is similar to japanese job search engine.
2) consulting system. many students don't know where and how to start searching interns, even they know them, sometimes it's difficult to match there exact interest to the programs. so we provide consulting service to solve those problems together.
3) training service. (paid) since lots of students are afraid that weather their skills meet with qualification or not and have worries about other technical issues, we provide simple training which includes whole preparation to internship or volunteer program so that they can start their program smoothly and without basic problems.
the background of this service is;
in Cambodia, job searching market is still depended on connection. so that less opportunity students like from rural area find it difficult to find out a good job even though they are skilled and well-trained. one reason is this.
another reason is that even though there are enormous youth in Cambodia, few of them are skilled and gradually mismatching between companies who want skilled student and students who don't know what they should learn. training for them solve this problem and furthermore, help economic growth in Cambodia.
that's all.
we couldn't complete financial part.
these are everything i got from that program.
i can't appreciate anymore to everyone i met there.
thank you so much.
