Matic explained at the project’s workshop in the Serbian Chamber of Commerce that entrepreneurs should be trained to create conditions for self-employment, in order to solve the problem of the large number of unemployed and to give domestic industry a more competitive edge.
The project was initiated by The European Training Foundation (ETF), which gathered eight institutions from Serbia that signed the Act on national partnership, whose aim is work on entrepreneurship training. These institutions are: the Ministry of Education and Sport, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management, the National Employment Agency, the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, the Republic Development Bureau, the Serbian Agency for the Development of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and Entrepreneurship, the Faculty of Economy, and the non-governmental organisation ‘Gradjanska inicijativa’.
Matic stated that the central focus of this project is the promotion of the European Charter on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, which contains parts referring to the training and education of entrepreneurs and whose aim is to make EU countries the most competitive market economy in the world by 2010.