Badly in need of financial and other forms of support to stabilise their substantively weak medium and small enterprises (MSE’s), as well as to support the arduous post-Covid-19 process, business owners will benefit from the intervention of a triumvirate comprising two regional development support institutions, the Caribbean Export Development Agency (Caribbean Export) and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) along with the European Union (EU) to provide them with financial assistance to help retool and preserve jobs that have been threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The disclosure, made early last week, brings together a development support partnership that has already made a mark with medium and small businesses in the region.
The current initiative reportedly represents the fourth round of grant support funded by the EU under a €30.8 million Regional Private Sector Development programme being implemented by Caribbean Export.
In the wake of the announcement of the new business support window, EU Head of Cooperation in the region Luis Maia, reportedly expressed the hope that the call for proposals for funding from the support window “will provide the necessary tools for firms to build resilience to navigate the Covid-19 crisis and beyond.”
While the grant support programme has reportedly benefitted more than six hundred businesses in the region, small businesses in some countries, not least Guyana, have complained about being ‘left out of the loop’ as far as adequate access to information regarding such opportunities are concerned.
Local small-business owners who have expressed their eagerness to benefit from such programmes have told this newspaper that they generally have no reliable access to information regarding opportunities such as the one currently afforded by the triumvirate. One small-business owner in the agro-processing sector told this newspaper that the predicament of the local small-business sector has to do with the fact that neither the local state agencies nor the Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) appear to have sufficiently strong links with the regional and international agencies offering these facilities. “What is needed is for us to be able to get access to this kind of information at some specific place or places and to get information as to the procedures for applying for support,” the small-business owner told this newspaper.
The report on the initiative says that the CDB and the EU will be co-funding the grant facility through a technical assistance programme that seeks to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 and to provide ongoing capacity for building through e-learning. Caribbean Export will be the implementing agency for the technical assistance programme to which the CDB will contribute US$600,000.
Caribbean Export is quoted as saying that setting aside the timeliness of the initiative, it is also necessary “if firms are to come back stronger, preserve jobs and create more.”
A CDB functionary is quoted as saying that the initiative seeks to respond to an “urgent need for technical assistance and capacity-building programmes to help businesses survive, remain competitive, and regain market share in export and domestic markets,” in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
With the advent of Covid-19, struggling and some barely surviving micro and small businesses have expressed to this newspaper their concern over the paucity of relevant information and practical support for local businesses, many of which they say are now threatened with extinction. While many of them acknowledge the “limited support” forthcoming from the Small Business Bureau (SBB), they frequently wonder aloud as to whether either the operating rules of the SBB or the extent of its financial allocation allows for an adequate response to crises like the ensuing one.
A CDB official has said that the initiative is designed to help businesses survive, remain competitive, and regain market share in both local, regional, and international markets, which is what some local small businesses say they need. The official is reported as saying that the current initiative aligns with several other measures, including loan support and capacity-building undertaking which the CDB has previously supported to assist the business sector in its Borrowing Member Countries.
Last year, Caribbean Export and the CDB undertook a joint initiative to contribute to a regional survey aimed at assessing the impact of the pandemic on medium and small enterprises in the region, as well as ascertain the levels of support required to assist them during the crisis and better position them to manage its consequences.
