Kosi Yankey-Ayeh
THE NATIONAL Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) has taken steps to ensure that less priority is given to beneficiaries of government’s GH¢750 million Coronavirus Alleviation Programme Business Support Scheme (CAPBUSS) in the disbursement of GH₵90 million, under the NBSSI-Mastercard Foundation Recovery and Resilience Programme for Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME).
The Executive Director of NBSSI, Kosi Yankey-Ayeh, made this known in an interview last Thursday when she disclosed that about 500,000 business owners had before the October 15, 2020 deadline applied for financial reliefs totaling GH₵2 billion under the support programme also known as ‘Nkosuo’.
The decision to exclude CAPBUSS beneficiaries from the Nkosuo programme, she said, was to ensure that opportunity and wealth was evenly spread across sectors of MSMEs where priority would be given to women-owned businesses.
“One of the things we made clear in the beginning was that those who benefitted from the government funding could not benefit from this funding because we wanted to allow other people to also benefit,” she said.
The NBSSI, she said, would rely on its database to ensure that proper evaluation and validation of applications from businesses were done, as disbursement was to commence soon.
“Before payment is made, it goes through a process of realigning what we have paid out under CAPBUSS.
“One thing we have come to realize is that when people say that “they haven’t got the money” and we go into our database, we see that they have actually received the funding. And this has been easy to detect with technology,” she said.
Despite the enormous impact government funding made during the Covid-19 pandemic, the executive director believed that more funding was needed to support MSMEs since most financial institutions remained unfriendly to the MSME sector which accounted for 90 per cent of all businesses in the country.
By Issah Mohammed