Matambo
The Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) says K32 billion has been disbursed to over 33,000 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) through the World Bank funded Financial Inclusion and Entrepreneurship Scaling (FInES) project which started in 2020.
The bank which is implementing the project revealed this on Tuesday in Mponela during Media Orientation which was attended by Members of the Association of Business Journalists (ABJ).
FInES Project Manager Dr Mark Lungu said that they have managed to reach out to 3,603 Men representing 11%, 24,348 Women representing 74% and 5,011 Youths representing 15% of project beneficiaries.
According to Lungu, percentage of loans disbursed to target group of women is 46%, men is 42% and on youth is 12%.
He, however, worried that some of the beneficiaries are failing to access the loans due to lack of collateral of which he said that they are looking into the matter to find a better solution so that everyone should be able to access it.
On his part, Deputy Governor for Reserve Bank of Malawi William Matambo said FInEs project was implemented to enable MSMEs access loans to boost their businesses after noticing that they are excluded when it comes to financial access.
“There have been a number of surveys that have been done that have identified that most of these people are the ones that are financially excluded and the idea was how could we bring this thing that is so important to development for people to access finance and do proper entrepreneurship that will eventually boost the country’s resources and also create wealth for them that is when we came up with this project,” he explained.
FInES is a five-year Government of Malawi project being implemented by the Reserve Bank of Malawi under the Project Implementation Unit (PIU) with support from the World Bank and it cost USD 86 million.
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