NBSSI commences second phase of disbursing funds to SMEs

The National Board for Small Scale Industries has commenced the second phase of fund disbursement to medium scale businesses who have suffered largely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Executive Director of the NBSSI, Ms. Kosi Yankey-Ayeh in an interaction with the media said some GHC30 million has been set aside for medium-sized businesses who will benefit from the Anidasuo fund.

“There are people who applied upwards of up to two thousand Ghana cedis, we’ve also initiated the process to start with the Anidasuo fund, which is those who applied above two thousand cedis. And we are working very closely with the participating financial institution that have been selected to ensure that all the beneficiaries have the needed access and will get to people”.

Ms. Kosi Yankey-Ayeh

She explained her outfit is working tirelessly to ensure beneficiaries receive their funding, albeit there has been some teething challenges with conflicting mobile money accounts and names assigned to them.

“There’s been a lot of conversation as to, are we really disbursing, yes we have been disbursing. Some people claim they haven’t received the funding and yes there have been challenges that have come up. Before we gave out the funds, as much as possible we tried to match the names of the MOMO with the names of the persons who have applied and it’s amazing that over thirty percent of the beneficiaries usually do not have the names that they applied with on their MOMO”.

 “So when we go out to make payments, we realize that the funds are returned back to us because the names do not correspond, so we would now have to go back and look at twenty thousand applicants and see how we are going to reach them to ensure that the name they’ve given and the MOMO they’ve given us really align. But as much as possible over sixty thousand plus have benefited or received access to funding”.

Ms. Kosi Yankeh-Ayeh revealed that disbursement is currently ongoing “and so every day we release some funds. We’ve set target for ourselves and as much as possible we want to close so that we can be able to go through and see all the changes that we’ve made in the lives of the Ghanaian people”.   

First phase of disbursement of funds

The first phase of the disbursement, the Board dispensed some GHC57 million out of GHC600 million set aside by government in support of the Alleviation Program Business Support Scheme for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

So far, disbursements have covered all 16 regions, with the Ashanti Region leading, followed by the Eastern Region, and Central with the Greater Accra Region being the fourth followed by the Western Region, and then Volta Region.

In total, some 64, 000 businesses captured under the Adom Micro-Soft Loans for Micro Enterprises received their loans via Vodafone cash.