Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon is en­cour­ag­ing more en­tre­pre­neurs to take part in the $500 mil­lion long-term loan guar­an­tee scheme for SMEs in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor which was im­ple­ment­ed by the Gov­ern­ment in the 2023 bud­get.

From this fa­cil­i­ty com­pa­nies can ac­cess loans from the ma­jor com­mer­cial banks for up to 10 years and re­ceive a two year mora­to­ri­um on re­pay­ments, with the Gov­ern­ment guar­an­tee­ing 80 per cent of the loan val­ue.

Speak­ing at the sec­ond in­stal­la­tion of Scale­Up TT held yes­ter­day, Gopee-Scoon said pred­i­cat­ed on the glob­al recog­ni­tion of the pro­gramme, the first co­hort of Scale­Up T&T was launched in April 2021 with 11 par­tic­i­pat­ing com­pa­nies from the man­u­fac­tur­ing, agro-pro­cess­ing, in­for­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vices sec­tors.

“Up­on com­ple­tion most com­pa­nies that par­tic­i­pat­ed re­port­ed be­tween 25 to 75 per cent growth in rev­enues, 25 to 80 per cent growth in ex­ports and over 13 new jobs were cre­at­ed,” she said.

Re­cent­ly, one of these com­pa­nies-Bertie’s Pep­per Sauce was award­ed the Elite Mi­cro Proces­sors Award by the Su­per­mar­ket As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T.

Ac­cord­ing to the min­is­ter, this high­lights “the in­flu­en­tial im­pact” of the Scale­Up pro­gramme on lo­cal SMEs.

Gopee-Scoon al­so recog­nised the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion (UTC) for im­ple­ment­ing the pro­gramme.

“The UTC al­so ex­pand­ed its reach to in­clude SMEs, in to fa­cil­i­tate the unique fi­nanc­ing needs of this cat­e­go­ry of busi­ness­es in T&T.

“One such pro­gramme im­ple­ment­ed by the UTC to meet the fi­nanc­ing needs of SMEs is Ur­pre­neur­Plus,” Gopee-Scoon ex­plained.

She added this start-up ac­cel­er­a­tor fa­cil­i­ty emerged out of a part­ner­ship be­tween the UTC and the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) through UWI Ven­tures Ltd.

The pro­gramme tar­gets young start-up busi­ness­es op­er­at­ing for less than three years and pro­vides coach­ing, train­ing and men­tor­ship to such com­pa­nies.

Since its in­cep­tion, the pro­gramme has trained over 300 en­tre­pre­neurs in in­no­va­tion and plan­ning.

Fol­low­ing an over­whelm­ing re­sponse to Ur­pre­neur­Plus, the UTC then in­tro­duced Scale­Up, fo­cus­ing on scal­ing-up SMEs, en­abling them to ex­pand rev­enues, ex­ports and em­ploy­ment.