Creating viable employment in productive jobs is a core strategy in reducing poverty and creating wealth in societies. Over the past twenty years, and across the world, there has been a growing consensus that this is best achieved through the private sector.

What this has meant in practice is the restructuring and privatisation of old and inefficient state sector industries, and at the same time supporting the creation and growth of small businesses, which are the motor of most successful economies.

WYG International has been at the centre of this economic transformation. From the earliest days of Perestroika in the former centrally planned Soviet countries, we have restructured and helped to privatise hundreds of sclerotic state-owned industries in almost every industrial sector. Whilst job losses have sometimes been the short-term result of this, the jobs retained are real jobs and WYG International has established the platform for new growth in these companies.

In parallel we have supported job creation in small business using a toolkit which includes providing courses in entrepreneurship to unemployed people, developing incubator workshops, designing innovative schemes for making finance accessible to business people, training business consultants and establishing business support centres which are a ‘one-stop-shop’ for people needing business advice.

Perhaps most important of all, WYG International has assisted governments to develop legislation and regulation which is friendly to business – cutting red tape – and is attractive to inward investment.