Close to one hundred small business owners and young entrepreneurs have been empowered with the various skills and tools needed to comply with tax modalities in Cameroon so as to optimise their ventures.

During a one-day workshop organised today by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Centre of the Denis and Lenora Foretia, SBEC, Yaounde, the young entrepreneurs had the opportunity to learn practical approaches to their businesses from experts.

In a three-module workshop, participants started the day by learning how they could placed their product or business in the market and optimise profit.

In this module, Dr. Ahanda Sosthene, lecturer of Business administration and Project Management at the University of Yaounde I, told the small business owners to always be knowledgeable on the products they are selling, have a reason for selling them, master the size of the market, how they can add more value as well as possible challenges they could face in the business.

For the business to grow in a favourable environment, it must be registered and declare its taxes, participants were told. This ushered in the second trainer of the day, Mr. Ngeh Edison who stressed combed through the various small tax systems in Cameroon.

After going through the various requirements for registering a business as well as the various tax systems, he divided the participants into various groups; those with a registered business, those with an unregistered business and those with ideas to start up a business and those without an idea. The practical exercise consisted of listening to the challenges faced by the business owners and seek solutions.

“I have last declared my taxes four months but I have not been able to make profits all this while reason why I have not been to the taxation office,”Yannick Djocko, owner of a digital marketing agency said.

On his part, Roger Ngwete who runs an unregistered pineapple transformation business admitted he did not have a clue on how to go about getting his business registered, reason why he has remained in the informal sector since he created the business.

To all these worries, practical solutions were proposed by their ‘coach’ before the day rounded off with a practical module on accessing finance by small business owners.