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- Through Scotiabank, Mona School of Business and Inter-American Investment Corporation IIC partnership

Over 100 entrepreneurs operating small and medium enterprises operating across the island will be participating in a business diagnostic and technical assistance programme developed by the Inter-American Investment Corporation, and arm of the Intern-American Development Bank geared at helping them to ability to assess their business, improve their overall operational competitiveness and access financing.

The international agency will be partnering with Scotiabank and the Mona School of Business at the University of the West Indies to provide participating SMEs with an individual diagnostic assessment/review of their business done by technical consultants from IIC to determine specific areas for improvement. Based on the diagnostic assessment done in phase 1 of the project, the IIC technical teams were in the island to launch phase 2 of the programme which includes providing the technical assistance needed for the businesses.

The team recently concluded a technical assistance workshop focused on branding the business, improving customer service and service delivery which was attended by 30 small business entrepreneurs. Patsy Latchman Atterbury, vice president of small business banking at Scotiabank said that these workshops have been extremely beneficial to the participants to date. “As small business entrepreneurs, they often get caught up in the day to day running of their enterprise and sometimes don’t place get enough time to stand back and assess their business or think about issues such as promoting their businesses and developing their customer base. The current workshops which were aimed at helping the entrepreneurs to identify areas of need, improve their business image, visibility and marketability and increasing their customer base will in the end improve their profitability and help them to grow their business.”

The current IIC technical assistance workshops on customer service, business process re-engineering and market development is phase two of an ongoing programme which goes by the Spanish acronym FINPYME. n phase 1 of the programme which occurred in November 2009, the IIC team held two energy efficiency workshops for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in Kingston and Montego Bay. The objectives of these workshops were to highlight how energy efficiency measures are for SMEs and to suggest practical ways for them toreduce their energy expenses.

The program has been successfully implemented in Central America and Colombia and was launched in five countries of the English-speaking Caribbean in March 2009. Companies participating in the program are active in many different sectors, such as agriculture and agribusiness, commercial services, manufacturing and tourism. Local consultants have now completed diagnostic reviews of these companies, and the IIC and its local partners are beginning the next phase of the program: technical assistance.

In Jamaica, more than 100 SMEs were introduced to the programme at the launch in February 2009. Currently, the Mona School of Business have completed 13 diagnostics and will continue accepting more applicants for diagnostic and further technical assistance.

Thanks to funding from the Republic of Korea, many of these companies are eligible to receive individual technical assistance to assist them in resolving some of the operational problems highlighted in the diagnostics. In addition, all companies will be invited to group TAs, which will be co-sponsored by Scotiabank, and will focus on a series of practical workshops on important topics to the companies.