GHS 600m Covid soft loan: Electronic alerts, no cash – Traders reveal
New revelation made by market women at Abbey’s Park in the Kumasi Metropolis, indicates that despite receiving electronic notifications/alerts for a GHS 2,000 soft loan from government, the market women were unable to access the funds.
To add salt to injury, the market women bemoaned payments made to some persons/representatives from the Ghana Enterprise Agency (GEA) – then the National Board of Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) – to help fast-track the loan acquisition process for them.
“I applied for the GHS 600m Covid-19 soft loan announced by President Akufo-Addo, I was supposed to be given GHS 2,000 and although I got a notification on my phone that my loan application had been successful and was due to receive GHS 2,000, I never saw that money. It was never given to me.”
“The gentleman who helped process the loan application for me, also called me to tell me that my loan application had been successful and that I would get the money, but I never did,” quipped one trader by the name Yaa Asantewaa.
“And the painful part of this whole thing is that, we actually paid some monies to help fast-track the loan process,” she added.
The revelation made by the traders during a Townhall meeting with BudgIT Ghana on Wednesday, November 30, 2022, further reinforces the poor, inefficient distribution of Covid funds to struggling micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) amid the pandemic.
Statements made by the market women in Kumasi – and also by other market women during BudgIT Ghana’s Townhall meetings across the country – paints a picture that stands in sharp contrast to that propagated by the GEA.
The GEA has indicated that more than 300,000 businesses have benefitted from the GHS 600 million Covid-19 stimulus package established by government.
According to the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Enterprises Agency, Kosi Yankey Ayeh, the agency was able to able to process over 900,00 applications that sought assistance from the programme aimed at supporting businesses affected by the covid-19 pandemic.
“The first announcement was GHS 600 million and all the funds there, have been utilized to support businesses. Over GHS 500 million plus were really injected in providing finance to businesses to build them and some of the funds were also used to provide technical assistance across the nation.
“So if you look at the data of the numbers of what we’ve been able to achieve, you see that we have over 300,000 people [MSMEs] who were able to access these funds in every region and district,” she said.
The COVID-19 outbreak reduced productivity, caused job losses and a steep decline of revenue for businesses, households and individuals, hence, the support for the sector was to enable businesses grow and expand to create more jobs.
The GHS 600 million COVID-19 stimulus soft loan package scheme was to be disbursed to MSMEs hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. The loan is expected to have a one-year moratorium and a two-year repayment plan.
The Townhall meeting by BudgIT Ghana was to ascertain the adaptation/coping strategies of MSMEs in relation to employment and working conditions, impacts on wages and incomes, food consumption, borrowings and
asset holdings, and the level of government support.
It was also aimed at providing stakeholders the opportunity to share experiences about their resiliency adaptive strategies during and post-Covid-19 economic recovery and to generate a strategic business level discussion data on lessons into future socioeconomic preparedness and response to strengthen business resiliencies.
Additionally, it was also to advocate for integrating community socioeconomic resilience strategies’ adaptation into transparency, participation and accountability frameworks in the utilization of public funds at the national level and local level by BudgIT Ghana.
