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Business development services in Poland - reaching rural areas
01.09.1999
For the last five years, a small pilot project has been undertaken in rural Poland to establish groups capable of supporting SME development. Prior to this project, most BDS efforts had been concentrated in the towns, and this project aimed to work with local government in the villages to foster new businesses in the countryside. A feature of its success was that it was built upon the same core principles as those outlined by Gibson (1997). However, it is concluded that the role of local government as an umbrella structure for those entities, and a source of supplementary support, was also a necessary ingredient in that success, within the context of rural Poland.