SME development initiatives: Women parliamentary secretaries to meet soon to delineate plan

LAHORE: A concrete plan for economic empowerment of women would be derived in the joint meeting of women parliamentary secretaries to be called soon at Islamabad.

It was disclosed by Dr Shahida Rehmani, Parliamentary Secretary, federal Ministry of Industries and Production on Monday during a visit of the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (SMEDA) head office.

The meeting held on this occasion was attended by Socrat Aman Rana, General Manager Central Support, Ms Nadia Jahangir Seth, General Manager Policy Planning, Ashfaq Ahmad, General Manager Business Development Services and Sheharyar Tahir, Head External Relations Department of SMEDA.

Dr Shahida Rehmani, while addressing the SMEDA experts observed that the critical economic situation of Pakistan demands active participation of women in the mainstream of business and economy. She said that the women artisans working in different sector of business should be helped out to become formal entrepreneurs.

She underlined the need of making support interventions for women entrepreneurship development at gross-root level. She lamented that the skilled women working in different businesses and professions were not being paid well. Therefore, the government wants to provide them with a fool-proof support mechanism for setting up their own enterprises, she said adding that the support mechanism backed up by an easy access to finance would be discussed at length at the proposed joint meeting of ladies parliamentarians. She assured also to invite SMEDA in the meeting.

Earlier, Nadia Jahangir Seth, GM Policy and Planning Division of SMEDA gave a detailed presentation on SMEDA’s services, projects and initiatives for SME development in the country. She informed that SMEDA was already working to bring out a separate set of policies for developing entrepreneurship among women, apart from the incentives and facilities determined in the main SME-Policy-2021.

Highlighting the general strength of SMEs, Ms Nadia told that the country had about 5.2 million registered SMEs making 40% contribution to the GDP with 30% share in the exports. She told that SME sector despite being the biggest business and industry sector had very limited access to finance. Only 6.51% financing in the formal sources belongs to SME sector, she said and informed the total number of SME sector borrowers in the banking industry had been recorded 164,756 only across the country, in which number of women based SMEs is extremely low.

Socrat Aman Rana, General Manager SMEDA’s Central Support Division, while expressing his views on this occasion pointed out the financial limitations to be experienced currently by SMEDA in running SME development initiatives of SMEDA. However, he said that despite limited resources and very lean HR structure, SMEDA was delivering a vast range of services, projects and programmes for SME development across the country.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023