President Ruto host Chamber boss Ngatia at State House, appraised on programs, trade missions

President William Ruto who also doubles as the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KNCCI) patron yesterday afternoon hosted chamber president Richard Ngatia at State House Nairobi and appraised on upcoming partnership between the national business lobby group and MasterCard Foundation among other programs and trade missions.

During yesterday’s meet in Nairobi, the duo deliberated on the grassroots business fund that will help enhance the business’ life cycle by providing working capital.

Ngatia said the chamber is keen on building capacity, policy reform guidance and offering the much needed trade facilitation and access to markets and digitisation of services for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

“The program shall shepherd businesses to ensure growth and sustainability over a five-year term.” Ngatia said.

President Ruto has been categorical that his administration will capacity build all business particularly SMEs in-line with the Kenya Kwanza manifesto and the bottom-up model.

In 2020, KNCCI, Mastercard mooted a Sh600 million economic resilience and recovery program to support youth and women owned businesses’ impacted by COVID-19 pandemic that benefitted tens of thousands of youths and women who own businesses impacted by the pandemic.

This was a premier business recovery initiative that targeted 100,000 outlets at the local level.

Through a project dubbed ‘Mastercard Foundation COVID-19 Recovery and Resilience Program’, the KNCCI successfully offered support to businesses that required financial and technical support to continue their operations and preserve jobs under the then prevailing market disruptions.

The program was aimed at expanding access to financial services to ensure business continuity and sustainability during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Only chamber members were eligible for the free loan financing program.

“Our goal is to help Micro and Small Enterprises survive the economic downturn and improve their resilience to enable them to continue to create employment and contribute to the country’s economic resurgence. We are working towards addressing the most pressing issues facing our economy today, which are loss of employment and collapse of small businesses as a result of COVID-19 outbreak. Young people and especially young women need this support for us to quickly mitigate the economic impact of the crisis,” said Ngatia.

The program came as a reprieve for the majority of small scale traders who were agonising from business losses and total collapse subjecting millions of the unemployed youth and women to lives of destitute.

In 2019, Kenya recorded a 5.6 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while IMF projects it to drop up to 1 per cent this year.

While he graced the chamber Annual General Meeting (AGM) held in Nairob in November last year, president Ruto urged financial institutions to be flexible on how they lend money to micro, small and medium enterprises.

He said the greatest challenge facing these small enterprises was the concept of financing their projects.