KARACHI: Despite massive training programmes for the promotion of small and medium enterprise (SME) finance, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) said there is still a complete lack of awareness among bankers as well as SMEs about SBP’s policy and related finance schemes.

The central bank along with all previous governments and the Ministry of Finance have been emphasising that SME is the backbone of the economy and should be promoted as a top priority.

The SBP has given banks 20 days to submit their plans and three months (July-Sep 2018) to execute them with concrete results.

Banks are generally reluctant about SME-financing as their default rate is the highest. However, the SBP is keen to the sector grow and has come up with new policies. For ‘Capacity Building and Awareness Creation’, the SBP has a strategy to undertake 100 training programmes and 150 awareness creation sessions per year, respectively

Through this, each bank will be required to target around 1,000 account holders per city where SBP has presence. Those who have their businesses in the form of sole proprietorship, partnership and private limited company but are not availing any financing facility from the respective bank are to be the primary target of this policy. Banks may also advise their customers/SMEs about their specific products.

The SBP has decided to use print, electronic and social media for awareness creation while the banks were advised that each is required to publish one advertisement per quarter highlighting salient features of SME finance policy, SBP refinance schemes and details of their specific SME products.

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2018