Project to boost SBA

BARBADOS’ Small Business Association (SBA) is one of three Caribbean agencies to undergo a major institutional strengthening exercise in an effort to reform the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector.The development comes as part of a project valued at euro$700 000 (BDS$1.75 million) and is financed by Pro(euro)Invest. The project is called Promoting Economic Development Through European And Caribbean Partnership (PED). It will seek to strengthen the capacities of intermediary organisations in the areas of investment promotion and attraction, internationalising SMEs, and networking. PED, which runs for 18 months, was launched recently in Florence, Italy, where the partners met in a first-round business mission. SBA was the only intermediary organisation from the Eastern Caribbean and the English-speaking Caribbean involved as a partner to the project. Other countries included the Dominican Republic, Belize, Spain, Greece, Belgium, and Italy. SBA chief executive officer Lynette Holder told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY that through the project, SBA would seek to create opportunities for Caribbean firms.She said the programme would provide strengthening to the SBA and capacity-building for several small firms through “practical elements”.“Because there is a component [where] we are going to take small businesses to several countries in Europe on field visits to meet with other agencies and companies and to establish what we call business-to-business relationships . . . these are some of the things we are hoping to gather. “So we are not just having the usual workshops and the usual seminars and so on, but we are also going to have some of the practical elements where firms will get the chance to go and see how business is done in other parts of the world – in the [European Union, or EU] countries in particular,” explained Holder.DiscussionThe first workshop was held last month under the theme Promotion Strategies to Access the EU Market. During the session, topics such as trade promotion, direct foreign investment and attraction promotion strategies, among others, were discussed.PED, which involves a number of workshops, roundtables and business missions, will also assist in the dialogue between the public and private sector in the area of planning for investment promotion. The project will allow the association to better plan economic promotion and investment attraction in the Caribbean region. In September, Barbados is expected to host a roundtable as a continuation of that programme.Holder said this project would also help “lift our standard of operation to first class”. (MM)