To increase the economic impact of entrepreneurs beyond their home countries, the South Asia Connect program was born.  The Nexus incubation and training model was expanded to support entrepreneurs in the surrounding countries of Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

The mission was to create a network of regional entrepreneurial leaders, combine the expertise of ACIR with regional best practices, and then use the collaborative networks for regional and global startup acceleration. The participating entrepreneurs got access to new business opportunities, built market-fitted strategies, and a connection to an international community in India and the surrounding regions.  The program included training for the leaders and startups in their home countries and at Nexus in New Delhi, networking events for business development and connections to private and public stakeholders to help the startups grow and succeed.   Interested in similar “train the trainer” impact programs for your region?  ACIR can make it happen.

“The South Asian Connect program is more than just an entrepreneurship program. It quickly targeted challenge areas of startups and trained the entrepreneurs on how to deal with them. Team work, skilled training, 1-1 mentoring, collaborative learning and useful networking are some of the key elements that make this training world class.”  Pritom Chowdhury, Bangladesh Entrepreneur