CUMO aims to accelerate the Promotion of the development of small-scale enterprises at village level and help village entrepreneurs to expand the scope, profitability and viability of their enterprises.As such, it considered problems that affect rural businesses financing namely:

• Borrowers misuse of loans
• Gender imbalances holding back clients from engaging in reasonably sized businesses
• Delayed loan repayment
• Defaulting
• Businesses that harm environment
• And High mortality rate

To limit these problems, CUMO formed an entrepreneurship trainings Centre CETC (CUMO Entrepreneurship training Centre) an arm of CUMO microfinance Limited that looks at delivering knowledge and skills to village entrepreneurs who crave to improve their capacity to achieve entrepreneurial success.

CUMO started this program as ‘Entrepreneurship Training on Wheels’ where it had a team of trainers who travelled in a van and trained the clients in their communities. Then CETC had four components namely;

• Entrepreneurship
• Marketing
• HIV/AIDS
• Environmental awareness

The training program has produced a lot of positive impact namely there is an improvement in business knowledge and good business practices; namely improvement in business record keeping and separation of business and household finances, enhanced confidence among entrepreneurs and establishment of sustainable business ventures.

Now the training has been pre-produced in form of Videos (voice over and how to videos) and audio dramas which are sent to officers over WhatsApp and are delivered by officers on their meeting day.An additional topic on Gender based Violence was incorporated into the trainings making it 5 components.

CUMO’s goal is to ensure a more enabling environment where economic opportunities are equally and evenly distributed across social segments including gender however there are a lot of issues on the ground e.g patriarchy, gender discrimination, injustices and even environmental degradation and deforestation which are limiting economic growth by restraining women from fully taking part in developmental activities including entrepreneurship.

So far Over 60,000 clients were reached with these trainings and CUMO through its training Centre will continue imparting knowledge to its clients in the above topics to ensure that together we build a sustainable Malawi.