President of the Small Business Association, Dalton Medford (right), presents a copy of the National Survey of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Sector to Minister of Small Business Development, Donville Inniss, yesterday morning.
THE $50 million Fund that has been allocated for the development of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Sector should be ready for disbursement by January, 2017.
Word of this has come from Minister of Industry, International Business, Commerce and Small Business Development, Donville Inniss. He made the comments while delivering remarks at the start of the SME Stakeholders’ Forum held at the Accra Beach Hotel yesterday morning hosted by the Small Business Association. It was last month in the Budget delivered by Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs, Christopher Sinckler, that it was announced that the $50 million special fund would be capitalised by money currently earmarked for the Industrial Credit Fund, managed by the Central Bank.
Inniss told the audience, which included several local small business owners, that the preliminary discussions on how that money will be allocated are currently being held between his Ministry and its strategic partners. With that in mind, he said based on reports from a recent meeting which involved the Ministries of Finance, Commerce and Small Business Development, the Central Bank, the Barbados Investment and Development Corporation and Fund Access, it is anticipated that the first set of additional funds for the MSME sector will become available by January 1, 2017. Inniss said this is not an arbitrary date, but was chosen based on what needs to be done to get the requisite provisions in place.
His comments came as he indicated that he will continue to demand the highest level of good governance from those who are tasked with managing State agencies under his watch.
“…We will insist that there is no slush fund mentality evolving in the system and there must be effective tools for measuring the success of our interventions. We will drive some of these State agencies towards a higher point of self-sufficiency through greater efficiency and a higher level of accountability,” he said.
Moreover, the Small Business Development Minister noted that access to finance continues to be a major challenge to enterprise development in this country. Given that, he said attention must be paid to the issue of “credit repair” to determine how best it may be used as a viable mechanism to mitigate the stigma associated with the high level of business failure among MSMEs. He is adamant that while the financial institutions have to make a profit, they must be more understanding and a little more lenient when lending to the MSME sector.
“I am not naïve; rather I am quite aware that the modus operandi of some elements of the financial services sector is to invest largely in those areas that promote their own economic viability. I contend, however, that it remains the corporate and social responsibility of those institutions, while not promoting a culture of mendicancy, but through a process of equitable, fair and reasonable due diligence, to be entrepreneurial in your efforts to assist such persons who can ill-afford to be disenfranchised by the very institutions within our society that their foreparents, parents and they themselves continue to support and assist in their profitability,” he said. (JRT)
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