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Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Trade Minister: Amendments will help SMEs

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577 days ago
20230722
Some of the booths at the Trade and Investment Convention at the Centre of Excellence, Macoya, yesterday.

Some of the booths at the Trade and Investment Convention at the Centre of Excellence, Macoya, yesterday.

ABRAHAM DIAZ

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia

busi­ness re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee Scoon is hope­ful the amend­ments made to the Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment and Dis­pos­al of Pub­lic Prop­er­ty Pro­cure­ment Act will make busi­ness eas­i­er for small busi­ness­es.

Speak­ing to re­porters at the Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion (TIC) at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence in Ma­coya yes­ter­day, Gopee-Scoon ex­plained that some of the amend­ments in the Act were made with SMEs in mind.

“In the first in­stance, they need to un­der­stand what is re­quired and I don’t want to speak out of turn. As you know there are amend­ments be­fore the par­lia­ment. We went to the Sen­ate on Thurs­day night and we stayed there un­til about close to 3 am Fri­day morn­ing. Amend­ments were made and it will have to go back to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives where we can ease the reg­u­la­to­ry re­quire­ments for small busi­ness­es or not nec­es­sar­i­ly small but for pur­chas­es un­der a mil­lion dol­lars. But not too much about that, it has to go back to the House and we have to make sure it is passed,” said .

She how­ev­er stressed that busi­ness­es should do what they can to ful­ly un­der­stand the pro­cure­ment process which has been in­tro­duced.

Min­is­ter of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice Fos­ter Cum­mings added the gov­ern­ment had been work­ing to im­prove the un­der­stand­ing of the pub­lic pro­cure­ment act among SMEs, while al­so pro­vid­ing a plat­form for these busi­ness­es to grow.

“On­ly this week, gov­ern­ment ap­proved a sum of $24 mil­lion as a sup­port pro­gramme for small and mi­cro busi­ness­es. It’s a grant pro­gramme we in­tend to af­fect at least 1,000 small busi­ness­es that way. This, of course, is a grant, not a loan. NED­CO will ad­min­is­ter the pro­gramme and we will in­clude in that pro­gramme some lev­el of men­tor­ship and train­ing for small busi­ness­es,” he said.

“I know that NED­CO has al­ready start­ed some ac­tiv­i­ty in that re­gard. They host­ed a we­bi­nar some time ago and they have in­di­cat­ed to me that they will do a fol­low up. There­fore if the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) is do­ing the same thing, it ex­pands our reach with the abil­i­ty to as­sist small busi­ness­es.”

Gopee-Scoon said she was very im­pressed by the turnout at the event, which fea­tured over 350 ex­hibitors and 260 booths.

TTMA Pres­i­dent Roger Roach said he was ec­sta­t­ic about the turnout but not­ed there was work to be done among lo­cal busi­ness­es to ex­pand their reach.

“There is still a lot of room for growth right here in our Cari­com mar­kets. That is step one. Step two is that be­yond the Cari­com mar­ket, there is al­so the di­as­po­ra which is Caribbean peo­ple liv­ing abroad who are ac­cus­tomed to the taste, the feel, the flavour, the style of our prod­ucts and ser­vices

“So we are en­cour­aged to go there next. But we have large busi­ness­es here too and those busi­ness are en­cour­aged by the amount of in­ter­na­tion­al buy­ers be­cause they are look­ing for ex­tra re­gion­al mar­kets,” he said.

The TIC clos­es to­day.


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