Summeren said that PUM is a non-profit organization. It consists of 3000 senior experts from 70 different disciplines. After their retirement these experts provide free services to the SME sector for various developing countries. He further said that Pakistan is the 70 target country to which the Dutch experts will provide free consultancy services. He said that he is on an initial visit to Pakistan and during this visit he will have negotiations with the stakeholders to identify the issues faced by the SME sector of the Punjab. In this connection, he is visiting FCCI to identify their issues along with necessary remedial steps needed to facilitate the SME sector.
He said that after compiling a comprehensive report, he will recommend PUM to send the experts from the related disciplines that could give experts opinion and help SME units to resolve their policy-related and financial issues. He said that the basic objective of PUM is to help the SME sector so that it could contribute its role to weed out poverty by creating new job opportunities in their concerned fields. He said that according to his opinion, the non-availability of sufficient capital, low profitability and minimum productivity in addition to high cost of doing business are major problem faced by the SME sector of Pakistan. He said that he would have more discussion with owners of the SME units so that the program launched by Dutch foundation could be made more productive and beneficial for the SME sector of Pakistan.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2017