New agreement focuses on growth of small businesses

HUMAN Development Institute (HDI) and the Women’s Micro Bank (WMB) last week signed a memorandum of agreement for the growth of micro and small to medium enterprises in the country.
Through this partnership, informal sector clients will go through training from HDI, whereas WMB will ensure credit facility to the graduated clients.
The credit will be supervised by HDI to ensure the amounts accessed by the customer are being utilised in the MSME sector and informal sector.
This is to ensure access to credit by skilled and trained customers to start or upgrade their income-generating activities.
“Savings should be the first expenditure of income, not the last,” says Gunanidhi Das, general manager of WMB. Access to finance and imbibing savings culture is the pillar of success for informal entrepreneurs and MSME sector.”
Bank chairman Ricky Mitio said: “Breaking cultural barriers by providing access to finance to women entrepreneurs will bring economic prosperity in informal sector, and increase livelihood for under-privileged families in an inclusive manner.”
Founder and chairman of HDI, Samuel Tam said: “With the support of WMB, HDI PV business scheme is now a great opportunity for all Papua New Guineans to learn business-class knowledge and thinking to develop, manage and own profitable income-generating projects or businesses from micro, small, medium and large enterprise in all types of industries including agriculture and livestock, fisheries, timber, horticulture, art-and-craft, processing, manufacture, IT, retail, wholesale, cooking, hospitality, export, import and others.”
HDI is a leading nationwide training provider registered with the National Training Council of Papua New Guinea.