SMEs from all terrorism and calamity hit districts of the province, particularly from Malakand division have submitted applications with the Project Unit (PU) of the project established under the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (SMEDA).
According to sources, the largest number of applications has been received from Lower Dir followed by Swat and Chitral respectively. Women Entrepreneurs are also taking keen interest in the project and over 270 women have also applied for availing the grant.
Matching grants are being given under the heads of rehabilitation, upgrade and cluster. Maximum amount under rehabilitation is up to Rs 2.5 million, upgrading up to Rs 2 million and Rs 10 million under common facilitation centre (CFC) for cluster development. The grants have triggered private sector investment in KP. For maintenance and guaranteeing of transparency in the grants distribution a special MIS system has been adopted to process without any discrimination with a robust mechanism of check and balance in project. Two different committees namely Documentation Review Committee (DRC) and Grants Review and Decision Committee (GRMC) have been established for processing cases.
The first committee reviews the documents and present cases in the second committee, which has representation from both public and private sector after thorough scrutiny take decision with majority vote. The project had successfully implemented its first round from 2012-2017 in which the project over achieved its targets by 200 percent by disbursing grants to the tone of Rs 1.5 billion among 1700 SMEs against the target of 850 SMEs. The project has created around thousands of direct and indirect jobs in the region. The financial progress of the project was 100% for the first round of ERKF and it had received 3rd position in a project competition held at World Bank Headquarters in Washington, DC, United States.
For the second round an amount of Rs 1.2 billion has been sanctioned for SMEs from both KP and FATA. However, presently, the second round is initiated only for the SMEs of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while project for FATA is yet to start due to some reasons. The application forms can be obtained from Sarhad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (SCCI), Women Chamber of Commerce & Industry (WCCI) Peshawar, Department of Tourism & Industry, and website of the SMEDA. The project has re-advertised call for applications from SMEs in the categories namely; women run business; tourism sector (hotels, restaurants) and CFC or cluster grant.