December 20, 2022 - With generous support from Aesop Foundation and Charities Aid Foundation, The Asia Foundation successfully delivered a 'Personal Initiative (PI) Training' to 11 current and aspiring North Korean refugee (NKR) entrepreneurs in South Korea. The goal of the program was to build and empower an entrepreneurial mindset, which is especially critical for NKRs to survive and thrive as entrepreneurs in a market-based economy, an environment that is unfamiliar compared to their South Korean peers. The training was mainly led by an NKR entrepreneur trained through the Foundation's PI Training-of-Trainer program in 2021.

The three-week, full-day program, composed of lectures, facilitated group discussions, and hands-on projects, constantly challenged its participants to think about their personal initiative as business owners. Through such repeated exercises, each training session aimed to empower the participants to be more self-starting, future thinking, and overcome barriers.

Weekly post-training session surveys showed that 100 percent of the participants were satisfied with the program, with one participant viewing each training session as "a gift for her business." The participant expressed that "through preparing my presentations throughout the training exercises, I developed a habit of future thinking – what potential opportunities and barriers may be for my business. Other colleagues' feedback on every one of my presentations expanded my views even further and made my business goals and plans much more concrete."

Another participant shared, "PI training helped me overcome my fears of taking risks. I was always hesitant to put ideas into action, especially after coming to South Korea, where everything was new and unfamiliar. But after going through the PI Training, I learned the importance of experimenting with ideas through actions with a bearable risk level and realized that this was the most effective way to survive and thrive in the market."

This PI Training program took place between December 6 and 20 as a part of a comprehensive support program specifically targeting NKR entrepreneurs: Accelerate Market Competitiveness of NKR Entrepreneurs in South Korea. Next year, The Asia Foundation plans to provide a series of Access to Market workshops and training, and an opportunity for program participants to test their products in mainstream offline sales channels in South Korea.

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 Journal of Science in collaboration with the World Bank Group.