Give a Day 26: 2024 Give a Day Series Concludes Successfully

As a platform for Cambodia’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, Give a Day has become a vital space for fostering connections, exchanging information, and strengthening collaboration to support entrepreneurs effectively. The series aims to deepen trust-based relationships among ecosystem actors, acknowledge common challenges, enhance the quality of support to entrepreneurs, share expertise, and create a community of mentorship, peer support, and collaboration. Additionally, it seeks to attract a network of stakeholders, providing a stable venue for future partnerships.

In 2024, the Give a Day initiative organized seven events in Phnom Penh, with a total of 361 attendees. Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, with 90% expressing overall satisfaction with the platform, 93% confirming new connections established during the events, and 99% affirming its effectiveness in facilitating engagement among ecosystem actors.

Throughout the series, Give a Day events also served as a platform to collect actionable insights under three key areas: Entrepreneur Support, Supporting Functions, and the Impact Investment Ecosystem.

Under Entrepreneur Support, eight actionable priorities emerged, including investing in human talent development through skills training, supporting startups' investment readiness, and enhancing financial literacy with a focus on women-owned businesses. Other priorities included fostering ongoing learning and innovation, advancing Gender Lens Investing (GLI), creating tailored business assessment tools, equipping SMEs with digital skills, and providing sector-specific support, particularly in agro-processing, packaging, and quality management.

In Supporting Functions, nine key actions were identified to address critical gaps. These included creating platforms for investment readiness and matchmaking, aligning entrepreneurial support organization (ESO) programs with startup needs, and defining ESO value propositions through targeted, demand-driven initiatives. The list also highlighted the need for legal support for MSMEs, fostering an entrepreneurial culture through mentorship and role models, providing economic recovery support, improving access to funding and mentorship information, and enhancing stakeholder coordination and communication to build trust and collaboration.

The Impact Investment Ecosystem highlighted seven priorities, such as improving awareness of impact investing and ESG principles, developing frameworks and tools to measure and achieve impact goals, and aligning company and investor objectives to attract responsible investments. It also emphasized the importance of developing strategies and blended finance solutions for Gender Lens Investing, ensuring inclusivity and scalability for enterprises in Cambodia.

As the Give a Day series looks toward 2025, it remains committed to its mission of enhancing collaboration among ecosystem actors. Seven events have been planned for Phnom Penh, continuing to build on the successes and insights gathered in 2024, further solidifying its role as a cornerstone of Cambodia’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The Give a Day event is co-financed by Khmer Enterprise, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA)and co-implemented by Khmer Enterprise and Swisscontact through the Enhancing Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Investments (3Ei) initiative.