Corporation evaluating performance to grow sector

By CLARISSA MOI
THE Small Medium Enterprise Corporation (SMEC) is evaluating its performance on developing small-medium enterprises, managing director Petrus Ralda says.
He told The National on Friday that as part of the evaluation process, they were undertaking policy reforms such as reviewing the SME policy 2016, the SME master plan 2016-2030 and the SME Corporation Act 2014.
“We will be holding a regional workshop on Oct 19 in Mt Hagen and then to Lae, Rabaul, and Port Moresby.
“We are also reviewing the SME Corporation Act to broaden the SME Corporation’s functions and regulatory powers.
“At the moment the SME Corporation Act is a government structure.
“We don’t have the regulatory powers to actually work with other stakeholders to regulate the development of the SME sector,” he said.
“That’s why we are reviewing the SME Corporation Act to actually broaden our functions and also our regulatory powers to support the SME development in the country.”
Ralda said another area they were looking at was the reserved business activity.
“The current cottage industry activity list is now under the Investment Promotion Authority (IPA) Act but we think that SME Corporation is the agency that should be regulating the reserved business activity.”
He added that the SMEC was putting together a reserved business activity list that would be showcased in regional and national workshops to get feedback from both government agencies and private sector to see if the list could be finalised and a submission made to the National Executive Council for gazettal.