Corporation plans to establish garment, textile incubation centre

By CLARISSA MOI
THE Small and Medium Enterprise Corporation (SMEC) is planning to establish a women’s entrepreneurship incubation centre in garment and textile programme to cater for the growing industry.
Acting managing director Petrus Ralda made the remarks during the garment and textile training programme’s 35th graduation in Port Moresby on Friday.
Ralda said the incubation centre would focus on skills training on garments and textiles, mentoring and capacity building of potential and existing micro, small and medium entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses.
“The board and management saw the importance in putting a system that we can see consistent and progressive sustainable development,” he said.
“So we came up with the SME incubation model, that’s the first in Papua New Guinea.
“What we are doing now is that we want to do a general one first. There are different models. Because we don’t have the financial capacity to do a specific one, we are doing a general incubation.”
Ralda said the general incubation centre would cater for all regulatory requirement agencies that regulate businesses such as the Investment Promotion Authority (IPA), Internal Revenue Commission (IRC), airports and sea ports services and others.
“We will get them to set up in the incubation centre,” he said.
“We want to put everything under one location.
“So from the entry to the exit, we will have different packages.
In between is the incubation process.”
So we will filter all the SMEs coming through the incubation process.”
Ralda said they were trying to build an incubation centre that was general in the sense that it would house all regulatory requirement agencies but would be specific to innovative and creative SMEs.
“In that way, we will have the SMEC through a more systematic and progressive development.”
He said plans were in place to expand and to have incubation centres in the 89 districts in the country.