DFID Supports Employment Promotion in China
The Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) China programme is facilitated by
the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MOLSS) with technical support from
the International Labour Organization (ILO) and financial inputs from DFID and
the Japanese Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour. The overall programme
objective is to contribute to poverty alleviation and employment creation. The
immediate programme objective is to enable the urban unemployed to start and run
their own businesses and to create quality jobs for others in the process.
 SIYB
China has been extremely successful, having reached 750,000 men and women. It
has helped approximately 240,000 laid off workers to start businesses, employing
more than 620,000 people. After initially being piloted in 14 cities, the
Chinese Government has rolled the SIYB programme out to 100 additional cities
and is aiming to expand to 300 further cities, covering all of China’s provinces
in due course. At the macro level SIYB has had a direct impact on Chinese
employment laws, policies and regulations. The project hosted a number of
high-level visits including Gordon Brown and Gareth Thomas.
Following excellent performance reviews, DFID China has recently agreed to
extend its support for SIYB China for another year. The objective of this
expansion is to facilitate the socio-economic integration of rural surplus
labour in secondary cities of Western China by enabling migrant workers to
start-up and run their own small social service businesses. There will be a
focus on starting small businesses in the tertiary sector, in particular
value-added community-based services (for example day care centres for children,
social services for the Elderly, basic care for people with disabilities).
In a departure from the first two years, the project will target some of the
most vulnerable groups within the migrant community, i.e. commercial sex workers
and domestic servants who are at high risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, former
prisoners and people with disabilities. Key poor provinces will be targeted (Gansu,
Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Chongqing and Yunnan).
 A
particularly exciting innovation is the mass media entrepreneurship promotion
programme in form of a teledrama/soap. This is – to the best of our knowledge –
the first in the world. As this is rolled out and its effectiveness is monitored
and evaluated, it holds considerable potential to be replicated in China and in
other countries. Any replication could benefit substantially from the upfront
investment made by SIYB China.
For further information on the SIYB China programme please visit
 http://www.siyb.com.cn.
Last updated 30th June 2006
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