Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Competitiveness Project

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The Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise (MSMEs) Competitiveness Project aims to increase productivity, and employment in participating MSMEs, by strengthening financial, and non-financial markets to meet the their demand, strengthening institutional support for employable skills, and business management, and, reducing critical investment climate constraints on MSMEs. Through its components, the project will: 1) deepen and expand the reach of financial services, and products available to MSMEs, including new risk capital instruments. This will be achieved through performance based matching grants, to assist a range of financial institutions build capacity to provide financial services to different segments of MSME sector; 2) strengthen enterprise skills and market linkages, by addressing market failures that limit the ability of MSMEs in obtaining the necessary skills and business services to exploit opportunities and overcome bottlenecks. It integrates a set of complementary, and mutually reinforcing activities to support enterprise needs, including a value-chain based subsector matching grant fund, tools for business schools to better train managers, business plan competition to catalyze innovation, and entrepreneurship, and restructuring of the national levy scheme, to ensure sustainability of firm-level training; 3) reduce compliance costs in business regulations regarding the formal sector, and create incentives for informal MSMEs to graduate to higher levels of formality, and thus facilitate their access to resources for growth. It will assist in implementing the simplified taxation regime for micro, and small businesses, and in reducing the cost of starting-up businesses, through a one-stop shop approach.