SME group gets support from coconut corporation to produce

The National Business

By ROSELYN ELLISON
A small-to-medium enterprise (SME) group out of Makurapau ward in the Kokopo’s Bitapaka local level government (LLG) area, East New Britain will be supported by the Kokonas Indastri Korporesen (KIK) to go into the production of virgin coconut oil.
This was revealed by KIK managing director Allan Aku during his visit to Makurapau on Friday.
The SME women’s group is a business group registered with Investment Promotion Authority (IPA) under business name Women In Tree of Life (WITOL).
Aku encouraged the women’s group to continue their efforts and assured them that KIK would assist by printing and having bulk order of labels prepared for the group’s virgin coconut oil and virgin coconut oil soap products.
The group was formed in 2019 with a membership of 200 and are planning to venture into packaging and export. I want to encourage you to continue with what you are doing as the KIK will help those in the coconut industry,” he said.
Aku said KIK had taken active steps to develop and grow the local virgin coconut oil production including signing a memorandum of understanding with the Credit Guarantee Corporation and under the MoU a product would be developed specifically for coconut SMEs.
“Work has started so give us time as we build the product and once the product is developed, we will announce it to our SMEs,” Aku said.
He added that apart from VGO and VGO soap production there were other activities such as coconut replanting which would be overseen by KIK officers in the province.
“We are ready to help you, our job now is to empower you to make your own money,” he said.
Aku also announced that among a number of big developments being pushed for ENB by corporation, there was also another project that KIK was now working on to get off the ground and this was the activated carbon processing facility.
He explained that ACP facility was where coconut shells would be processed into charcoal which could have two uses being barbeque briquettes and being processed into activated carbon to purify water and minerals such as copper and gold.