Since De­cem­ber, there has been an in­crease in peo­ple ap­proach­ing the Na­tion­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Ned­co) seek­ing en­tre­pre­neur­ial loans.

How­ev­er, at this point time Ned­co’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Calvin Mau­rice has lament­ed the vast ma­jor­i­ty of these ap­pli­cants are not push­ing in­no­v­a­tive bound­aries.

“We have seen the ap­proach­es in terms of the busi­ness en­gage­ment changed through dig­i­tal arrange­ments, on­line mar­ket­ing, and the en­gage­ments en­tre­pre­neurs have, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly and that’s what we are push­ing for a new type of busi­ness mod­el in re­gards to prod­ucts that can be ex­port­ed in terms of the, for ex­am­ple, tech­nol­o­gy, get­ting per­sons in­volved in de­vel­op­ing apps and that type of en­gage­ment and hence the rea­son why Ned­co is al­so piv­ot­ed to­wards the de­vel­op­ment of mod­els in terms of the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion,” said Mau­rice.

While there has con­tin­ued to be in­ter­est in terms of en­tre­pre­neur­ial loans, Mau­rice said most ap­pli­cants con­tin­ued to pur­sue spe­cif­ic types of busi­ness­es.

“Es­sen­tial­ly over the years, Ned­co has a clien­tele that is more in­to the re­tail sec­tor and trans­porta­tion, and we’ve seen that con­tin­u­ing in dif­fer­ent as­pects in terms of gro­ceries in terms of these types of re­tail stores, cloth­ing stores and those things. But Ned­co al­so is very aware that we must al­so be the cen­tre of the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion plan,” said Mau­rice, who added that the state en­er­gy had been at­tempt­ing to push pro­grammes which could bol­ster the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor or agri­cul­ture as op­posed to typ­i­cal re­tail mod­els.

In Feb­ru­ary last year, Ned­co signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing with Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute (Cariri) to al­low the shar­ing of re­sources in a bid to spark in­no­va­tion in the coun­try.

“In a week or two we will be do­ing a we­bi­nar with re­gards to Cariri ex­pos­ing en­tre­pre­neurs in terms of some of the ser­vices that can be ac­cessed. What we have been do­ing as well be­tween Cariri and Ned­co is for­mu­lat­ing a plan in terms of how our clients can get par­tic­u­lar types of sup­port from Cariri in terms of let’s say, light man­u­fac­tur­ing, and how can we can help us stim­u­late that par­tic­u­lar sec­tor. So over the last few months, we have been gen­er­al­ly putting mod­els in place. And we have now start­ed to roll off in terms of the en­gage­ment, the di­rect en­gage­ment with the en­tre­pre­neurs,” he said.

The state agency is al­so work­ing with In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank to pro­vide as­sis­tance through Busi­ness Ac­cel­er­a­tor Pro­grammes.

Ned­co’s op­er­a­tions raised some eye­brows re­cent­ly dur­ing the Pub­lic Ac­counts En­ter­pris­es Com­mit­tee when it was re­vealed that some $66 mil­lion had to be writ­ten off as bad debt.

Mau­rice clar­i­fied that amount had been a cu­mu­la­tive sum span­ning 15 years from 2002 to 2017.

“A foren­sic au­dit was done and the new board took ac­tion that was very crit­i­cal and de­cid­ed that the writ­ing off of this, what you call the de­fault loans or delin­quent loans. Not the writ­ing off the trans­fer of the link bank loans to the bad debt ledger as an ac­count­ing pro­ce­dure? In oth­er words, we di­vid­ed the ac­counts, in terms of the per­form­ing loans and the non-per­form­ing loans,” he said.

He ex­plained that those loans rep­re­sent­ed about 3,000 ac­counts out of over 14,000 loans which had been of­fered by Ned­co dur­ing that pe­ri­od.

He ex­plained, how­ev­er, that the trans­fer of bad debt served as a les­son for the state agency in terms of what ap­proach they should take go­ing for­ward.

“From 2018 Ned­co has a com­mit­ment to be­come sus­tain­able in that we be­come less re­liant on sub­ven­tion over a pe­ri­od of time. And in our strate­gic plan, we have de­vised the mech­a­nism where from par­tic­u­lar­ly now to 2025, be­cause our strate­gic plan of 2020 to 25 shows ex­act­ly that, the mech­a­nism to which Ned­co move to­wards self-sus­tain­abil­i­ty, not 100 per cent. But each year look at the re­duc­tion of the re­quire­ment of sub­ven­tion from the gov­ern­ment and that will re­quire Ned­co to have per­form­ing loans that will re­quire Ned­co to in­crease the amount of loans and to sur­vive or to be man­aged in terms of our in­come from in­ter­ests from these loan arrange­ments,” he said.

This ap­proach had to be ad­just­ed to ac­com­mo­date the chal­lenges cre­at­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, as Ned­co was sought out as a sta­bilis­er for sev­er­al lo­cal busi­ness­es who suf­fered dur­ing the re­stric­tions of the pan­dem­ic.

Ned­co’s En­tre­pre­neur­ial Re­lief Grant which had fund­ing of $30 mil­lion, Mau­rice re­vealed had over 3,000 suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants. At the PAEC sit­ting, it was con­firmed that an ad­di­tion­al $20 mil­lion had been al­lo­cat­ed to the state agency.

“Ned­co has been giv­en a fur­ther $20 mil­lion to sat­is­fy the resid­ual bal­ance of 10,000 some­thing in terms of ap­pli­cants who re­mained not be­ing sat­is­fied in terms of the grant. So gov­ern­ment has giv­en ap­proval to Ned­co for that, and we are now about to start con­tin­u­ing this,” he said, adding that the agency had a re­newed fo­cus on mi­cro-en­tre­peneurs who re­quire even small­er start-up funds rang­ing from $10,000-15,000 to get their busi­ness­es off the ground.

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