The ASEAN Small and Medium Enterprise Working Group (SMEWG) has worked with the US-ASEAN Business Alliance for Competitive SMEs and other stakeholders on the design of the “ASEAN Online SME Academy” during a regional consultation forum held recently in Bangkok, Thailand.

The forum stressed the need to set up the Academy because adequate and timely access to business information and training resources in local languages is critically important to SMEs.

Accordingly, the Academy will be a one-stop, open-access gateway that provides business information and training resources to support ASEAN SMEs’ start-up, development and internationalisation as well as to improve business development services to SMEs from their providers.

The business information and training resources posted in the Academy will be selectively translated into local languages within the bloc to maximise supporting -sources for regional SMEs.

Preliminary work on the Academy started since the launch of the US-ASEAN Business Alliance in March 2014, in consultation with the ASEAN SMEWG.

The regional consultation discussed core elements of the Academy, which will serve targeted SMEs in the region. It also allowed the SMEWG, Business Alliance partners and other stakeholders to finalise a statement of the Academy’s mission, vision, and potential content.

The Academy is a collaborative initiative between the US-ASEAN Business Alliance and the SMEWG. Business Alliance corporate partners supporting the Academy included eBay Inc., Hewlett Packard, MasterCard, Procter & Gamble, and Qualcomm.-VNA