Small & Medium Enterprise Development Authority (Smeda), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is going to launch a province-wide awareness campaign regarding Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) funded project of Economic Revitalization of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA (ERKF). This was stated by provincial chief, SMEDA, Javed Iqbal Khattak while talking to a group of journalists in his office, here on Tuesday.
He said that EKRF project was a joint initiative for the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA Secretariat to cater economic rehabilitation needs for militancy-hit areas identified under the recently completed Post Crisis Needs Assessment (PCNA). In this connection, a presentation for the business community of Peshawar is being arranged at Sarhad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (SCCI) on Wednesday. President SCCI, Afan Aziz will preside over the function while Javed Iqbal Khattak, provincial chief, SMEDA will give detailed presentation on the project. Similar, briefing will also be held in other chambers and associations.
The proposed project, he said, would help in the revitalization of the private sector in the crisis-affected regions through direct support for the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), attracting investments from the diaspora, and institutional capacity building including regulatory reforms.
The project is funded under MDTF grant of US $20 million and will be executed by the World Bank through SMEDA, the Department of Industries, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA Secretariat. In the project, the SME Development component of the Project has an allocation of $14 million with a share of $9.1 million and $4.9 million for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA respectively.
The SME Development component will be implemented by SMEDA and spadework for this challenging activity has already been started. There are three sub-components of the grant programme that are rehabilitation, up-gradation supports and capacity building & business development.
The rehabilitation component will provide direct support to the affected SMEs in the form of matching grants to the eligible enterprises, which may be used as working capital for reconstruction of basic infrastructure and acquiring, repairing machinery and equipment etc.
The sub-component of the up-gradation will support the up-gradation of SMEs for improving business productivity and efficiency. Matching grants to eligible individual SMEs for project, as well as group of SMEs for cluster development programmes will be provided.
These grants could be used for technological innovation, products development, adopting new packaging/labelling requirements, establishing common facility centres (CFCs) etc. Funds may be used for both capital investment and working capital. The sub-component of capacity building and business development will support capacity building of SMEs in partnership with the Business Edge Program of International Finance Corporation (IFC) and through procurement of business development services (BDS) required by the SMEs.