With the highly possible increase in downsizing trends, more and more people are made redundant. The next logical step for those people are: looking for another job and starting a business. The former is more desirable for those who place income security high in their list, but the latter is more desirable for those who are being fed up with all the corporate politics and seemingly unfair downsizing. hatever step you want to choose, I recommend you to consider the latter for two reasons:
1. Throughout the history of small business, being downsized is one of the most successful life changing experience in born new, thriving, entrepreneurs.
2. Getting back into the workforce with the standard you had before is not as easy as you think – businesses cut costs, and one of the area that are being heavily cut is payroll – bottom line, businesses want more for less these days.
Without further adieu, the following is the top 10 small business ideas for 2009 that might entice you to plunge into entrepreneurship:
1. Do-It-Yourself business
Most of the case, DIY reduce costs. If you can provide products and services that allow people to DIY something, such as creating your own home cleaning products, you are on a roll.
2. Energy saving business
This idea is definitely hot in the past few years, and in 2009 the emphasis on energy cost-cutting regimes will push any energy saving businesses even further. Producing or distributing LED lightings will be the right business this year.
3. Online business
Ah, my favourite small business idea. The wonder of the Internet is this: For as low as $50 (a domain name + web hosting fee) or even for free, you can start a lucrative online business and shoot for a chance to create a six figure business before this 2009 ends! Of course, one key factor: your competitiveness in a low-cost, high-competition market.
4. Baby boomer-related business
The highlight of the year: Baby boomers are retiring from the workforce, creating a mega-problem to the economy – thanks to the flawed MediCare, Social Security and retirement funds. Creating a business that act as a safety-net for those baby boomers will boom your business sky-high. One example of such business is entrepreneurship training business for baby boomers.
5. Cheap and/or recycled product business
“Turning trash into cash” type of business is very, very lucrative this year. With the increase in material and production costs, making use of ‘useless’ materials and create something out of them will proved to be a thriving business. One example: Creating Converse-like canvass shoes out of wastes – the scrapbooking style.
6. Home based business
The best cost-cutting innovation of all – work from your home! With the ever-presence of the Internet, working at home.
7. Charity and philanthropy
Giving as a business? Never – However, you can be a business that match recipients and givers, such as the web-based Kiva.com that match small business borrowers with lenders.
8. Outsourcing
There is a better solution in your cost cutting campaign – outsourcing. Outsourcing main benefit is leaning your company so you are more nimble and resposive to changes. The key in outsourcing is finding the right companies to outsource to. The business idea: outsourcing company that manage service buyers needs.
9. Mobile business
No longer a trend for road warriors out there, but a growing trend for new entrepreneurs who envision themselves as location independent business owners. Again, the Internet plays a major role in mobile business, as well as the more powerful and cutting-edge mobile technologies and gadgets. Your iPhone and MacBook Air will enable you to run your business wherever you are.
10. Bootstrapping and cost-cutting consultancy business
As every business owner aim to be leaner and more responsive, bootstrapping and cost-cutting consultants will have their moments this year – roles, such as energy consultants, Internet startup consultants, and similar others will enjoy substantial growth this year.
That’s it for my version of top 10 list. Care to share yours?
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — The United States, Ethiopia’s main donor, warned Friday that a new law adopted by Addis Ababa restricting foreign-funded aid groups may curtail its assistance.
Under the new law, any group that draws more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad will be classified as foreign, and thus banned from working on issues related to ethnicity, gender, children’s rights and conflict resolution. “We recognise the importance of effective oversight of civil society organisations… However we are concerned this law may restrict US government assistance to Ethiopia,” a State Department statement said.
Despite criticism, Ethiopia’s parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed the bill, which the government argues is solely to safeguard citizens’ rights.
Georgette Gagnon, the Africa director for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the law is a “repression, not regulation.”
“If enforced, this law will make Ethiopia one of the most inhospitable places in the world for both Ethiopian and international human rights groups,” she said in a statement.
The Horn of Africa nation, a key ally in Washington’s “War on Terror” against Islamist extremists, received more than 900 million dollars in aid from the US in 2008.
Ethiopia, a poverty-stricken country of 77 million, is among the world’s chief aid recipients.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (Reuters) – Ethiopian rebels who warned oil explorers against working in their region are issuing empty threats that will not deter the government from developing their homeland, a senior Ethiopian Woyanne official said on Friday.
This week the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) told Malaysia’s Petronas it would not allow any activities in the country’s remote east, and said working there would make the firm an accomplice in war crimes by the Ethiopian Woyanne military.
The government rejects accusations of abuses during its counter-insurgency operations in Ogaden, which borders Somalia.
“Such empty threats by the terrorist ONLF group will not deter the government from continuing development activities in the region,” Bereket Simon, special adviser to Ethiopian Prime Minister dictator Meles Zenawi, told Reuters.
“Such threats, being aired by ONLF supporters in London, are just another example of their reckless behaviour.”
Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned company, is one of more than a dozen international explorers hunting for oil and gas deposits in different parts of the huge Horn of Africa country.
The rebels have long objected to Addis Ababa inviting foreign energy firms to work in their arid homeland.
In April 2007, ONLF fighters killed 74 people in a raid on an Ogaden oil exploration field run by a subsidiary of Sinopec, China’s biggest refiner and petrochemicals producer.
In a land tormented by poverty, famine, drought, war and HIV/AIDS, Amanuel Hospital is Ethiopia’s only psychiatric hospital.
Until recently, its 360 beds were the last and only refuge for the mentally ill in a country of 77 million people.
Not surprisingly, the hospital had a grim reputation, with more patients than beds, no dining room facilities, no specialty wards, few drugs and even fewer doctors.
Amanuel used to be regarded more as an asylum than a hospital. Just five years ago, Ethiopia, with more than double Canada’s population, had only nine psychiatrists.
But a special relationship with the University of Toronto is beginning to change that, transforming the face of public health care in Ethiopia.
Dr. Clare Pain, a Global Health Scholar with Mount Sinai Hospital’s Peter A. Silverman Centre for International Health, first volunteered in Ethiopia 24 years ago as a British physiotherapist working with children affected by polio. In the early 1990s, she returned as a Canadian psychiatrist and made friends with Ethiopia’s few practising psychiatrists.
“It is a unique country,” she said. “It is an ancient, mysterious, enormously stable place, culturally and socially. Materially they are quite compromised, but spiritually and socially they are rich. I’m absolutely in love with the place.”
In late 2002, Dr. Atalay Alem of Amanuel e-mailed Dr. Pain seeking her help. He had a dream of expanding psychiatric care in Ethiopia by establishing a domestic training program for psychiatric residents.
Only, Addis Ababa University lacked enough qualified staff to establish a program by itself. Could Dr. Pain help?
His request came just as the University of Toronto was seeking to expand its educational relationships in other countries. When Dr. Pain approached her departmental chairman with a proposal to launch a voluntary teaching program in Ethiopia, the university jumped at the idea.
In a matter of months, Dr. Pain and Dr. Alem had established a program that would send three teaching teams a year to Ethiopia for a month each.
The teams, which consist of two psychiatry professors and one senior psychiatry resident from U of T, are voluntary and unpaid.
They instruct Ethiopian doctors in such specialties as forensic, child and geriatric psychiatry, and substance abuse. When they aren’t lecturing, they provide clinical supervision as Ethiopian residents make their daily hospital rounds.
“It’s great fun and a privilege to teach,” said Dr. Pain.
“It’s very rewarding because it is stimulating to work with smart residents, who ask smart questions. They come at your own stuff from a different angle.
“And there are hordes of bright, young, competent specialists at U of T who totally get it. It’s as if they re-find their vocation through the eyes of the Ethiopian residents and doctors.”
During the past five years, the visiting Toronto specialists have helped train and graduated 26 psychiatrists in Ethiopia.
But the impact on the country’s health system is even more impressive. With a growing cadre of trained psychiatrists, Ethiopia has established four 20-bed psychiatric departments in regional hospitals, in addition to clinics staffed by psychiatric nurses in 26 district hospitals.
“Everyone who is a health professional [in Ethiopia] is now required to do some training in mental health,” said Dr. Pain.
“There is an acknowledgment that there is no health without mental health. We’ve started to deliver better medicine.”
In fact, the Toronto Addis Ababa Psychiatry Project has been so successful it is about to spawn a variety of similar programs in 10 other medical fields.
U of T is planning to launch an additional 10 small educational collaborations with the University of Addis Ababa in internal medicine, general surgery, pediatrics, family medicine, emergency medicine, laboratory medicine and rehabilitation medicine.
It will also help develop a PhD program in nursing, expand Ethiopia’s pharmacy PhD program and help develop a master’s program in library sciences.
“We seem to have stumbled on a model that works really well at building capacity and sustainability,” Dr. Pain said.
“It is like having a kid: Once you sign on, you can’t not fulfill your obligation.”
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AFP) – Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba, who claimed double Olympic gold at 5,000 and 10,000 meters at Beijing, will run at the Boston Indoor Games on February 7, organizers announced Thursday.
Dibaba, the only woman two capture two athletics gold medals last August in China, has twice broken the women’s world 5,000m indoor record at this meet and set an outdoor 5,000m world record last year at the Bislett Games in Oslo.
The 23-year-old joins a lineup that includes Beijing Olympic men’s pole vault champion Steve Hooker of Australia, 2008 Olympic women’s pole vault runner-up Jenn Stuczynski and 1,500m bronze medalist Nick Willis of New Zealand.
Ethiopia’s leading opposition politician is in her 10th day of a hunger strike after she was jailed for life on Dec. 29 following a dispute with the government, according to her mother.
Birtukan Mideksa, 34, has been taking only juice and water and is being held in solitary confinement in a windowless 3-meter by 4-meter (10-foot by 13-foot) cell in Ethiopia’s Kaliti prison, said her mother, Almaz Gebregziabhere, who visited her in prison yesterday.
“I didn’t recognize her because of how she’s changed,” said Gebregziabhere, 72, in an interview today at her home in Addis Ababa. “I begged her for the sake of her daughter to eat, but she didn’t.”
Prison officials have banned all visitors except Gebregziabhere and Mideksa’s 3-year-old daughter, Halle, from visiting her, Gebregziabhere said. Gebregziabhere, speaking in Amharic through a translator, said the family had been unable to hire a lawyer for Mideksa because those contacted on her behalf have turned her down as a client, fearing government reprisals.
Mideksa, a leader of the now-dissolved Coalition for Unity and Democracy party, was first jailed after Ethiopia’s 2005 elections, in which the CUD claimed victory. She and dozens of other opposition leaders were sentenced to life in prison, though they were released in 2007 after a pardon agreement with the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
She was re-arrested Dec. 29 after she rejected government demands that she make a public statement saying she had formally requested the original pardon.
‘Humane Condition’
Bereket Simon, an adviser to Zenawi, said he wasn’t aware of Mideksa’s fast.
“We have a prison system whereby we hold prisoners in a humane condition,” Simon said. “This is a case where she has said that she didn’t ask for pardon and the decision of the judiciary is being applied. At this point, I don’t think it requires intervention by lawyers.”
Simon also said the government wasn’t interested in potential mediation efforts by the independent group that negotiated Mideksa’s initial release.
Following their release in 2007, some former CUD leaders chose exile in the U.S. or U.K. Mideksa stayed in Ethiopia and formed a new party that planned to contest the 2010 elections.
“Look what has happened to her,” said Berhanu Nega, who along with Mideksa led the CUD movement in 2005, in a phone interview from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The government “will never allow any peaceful transition in that country.”
Call to Struggle
Nega, who was elected mayor of Addis Ababa in 2005 before his imprisonment, has called for armed struggle to oust Zenawi. Nega left Ethiopia after his release from prison in 2007 to teach at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
His new movement, Ginbot 7, has formed an underground network inside Ethiopia with the goal of overthrowing Zenawi’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, Nega said.
The U.S., which views Ethiopia as a key ally in the fight against terrorism, offered a rare rebuke to Zenawi’s government following Mideksa’s arrest, warning Ethiopia to avoid steps that appear to “criminalize dissent.”
Government opponents accused the state of rigging the May 2005 poll, sparking protests in Addis Ababa. A judicial inquiry after the election concluded that government security forces had killed 193 opposition supporters in the unrest.
(To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via the Johannesburg bureau at [email protected].)
This week the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) told Malaysia’s Petronas it would not allow any activities in the country’s remote east, and said working there would make the firm an accomplice in war crimes by the 
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AFP) – Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba, who claimed double Olympic gold at 5,000 and 10,000 meters at Beijing, will run at the Boston Indoor Games on February 7, organizers announced Thursday.
Ethiopia’s leading opposition politician is in her 10th day of a hunger strike after she was jailed for life on Dec. 29 following a dispute with the government, according to her mother.