Financially Viable Training for Microentrepreneurs: The Business Model of ACCION's ABC of Business

This paper explains the business model of the ACCION "ABCs of Business" training program for microentrepreneurs that employs adult learning techniques to teach management skills. Since 1999, it has helped provide more than 548,000 classes to participants in 14 Latin American countries. The paper describes the efforts to promote financial viability in its own operations and the operations of the institutions to which it licenses its training materials:

• ACCION's ABCs of Business team developed the training materials;
• In order to achieve greater scale, it does not cater to microentrepreneurs directly, instead partners with local institutions and effectively trains the trainers;
• The local partners are most commonly MFIs and banks, but NGOs, universities, chambers of commerce, private businesses, churches, and secondary schools also benefit from ACCION's training programs.

In addition to the willingness and ability to pay license fees and royalties, the ACCION "ABCs of Business" team looks for the following characteristics in potential local partners:

• Services open to the general public;
• Appropriate marketing of training services;
• Service quality.

The paper also details lessons that ACCION has learned about providing sustainable business development services and how these lessons were incorporated into the program's structure. Lessons learned include (and are further detailed in the paper):

• Identification of training institutions that are committed to operational sustainability;
• The limitations of exclusivity agreements;
• The need to monitor license recipients;
• Ideal duration of product licenses;
• The need to diversify the types of clients who receive the ABCs of Business Training.