December 15, 2021 - On December 14, The Asia Foundation Korea successfully delivered its 12-week Personal Initiative (PI) Training, Training-of-Trainers (ToT) program, equipping three women entrepreneurs in Gyeonggi Province with the capacity to deliver PI training to other entrepreneurs directly. 

PI training is an alternative approach to traditional entrepreneurship training, developed by a group of researchers in Germany after the Unification of the East and West. The PI training has been empirically proven to generate better business results than best-in-class entrepreneurship training approaches, as peer-reviewed by the Science journal in collaboration with the World Bank Group.

PI Training begins with a ToT program that trains existing entrepreneurs as certified PI trainers, who will directly deliver the PI Training to potential beneficiaries. The Asia Foundation selected three women entrepreneurs currently operating in Gyeonggi Province as trainer candidates to participate in the ToT program. Over the first six weeks, the candidates learned the concept of PI and practiced delivering the training to peer candidates. For the remaining six weeks, the trainer candidates practiced delivering a pilot PI Training to an actual group of women entrepreneurs, with an extensive feedback session following each pilot training session. The pilot training session was delivered to eight currently operating women entrepreneurs in Gyeonggi Province. The ToT program ended with a closing ceremony, with a PI Training Master Trainer officially certifying the three trainer candidates as PI Trainers.
 
One of the participants and a newly certified PI trainer shared that PI Training built a new habit of thinking about her own business. She states that “through this PI training course, I found myself constantly asking questions and giving myself feedback from what I learned: How can I be more self-starting? More future thinking? Better overcome barriers? I also learned the importance of receiving feedback (…) and secured a wide range of sources of feedback that I can tap into while developing my new product line. I plan to apply the feedback from these sources to refine them directly (…)”
 
Partnering with the newly trained trainers, The Asia Foundation plans to deliver new PI training programs to additional women entrepreneurs in Gyeonggi Province in 2022.