In a bid to provide more opportunities and incentives for small business owners Prime Minister Imran Khan has directed the concerned officials to finalise the new Small Medium Enterprises (SME) policy.
The premier was chairing the review meeting on the promotion of SME’s.
PM Imran also reiterated its government’s vision and said that small industries were neglected in the past but the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf government is focused on providing facilities to them.
The meeting was informed that small and medium enterprises account for 40 percent of the total GDP of Pakistan.
It was apprised that loans will be provided to small and medium enterprises under the supervision of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and special attention will be paid to the business related to the information technology sector.
On August 16, the SBP introduced an initiative to improve access to finance for SMEs in collaboration with the Government of Pakistan to enable businesses that cannot offer security/collateral to access bank finance.
The initiative has been brand named ‘SME Asaan Finance’ or SAAF to emphasise the SME facilitation feature of this scheme to provide clean lending, i.e. lending without collateral to SMEs. SAAF is a refinance and credit guarantee facility developed through a wide-ranging consultative process. It aims to assist SME’s that are creditworthy but are still unable to access finance as they cannot offer the security required collateral by banks
