SBDC: $68 mil. spent to date funding small businesses

As of July 31, 1,934 small businesses have received funding totaling $68.1 million through the Small Business Development Centre (SBDC) Access Accelerator, its Executive Director Davinia Bain said yesterday during a Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers’ Confederation (BCCEC) and Ministry of Finance webinar entitled “Boosting Your Business”.

“When we say 1,934 clients, those are simply the clients that were funded through our organization. When we talk about clients who would have received either training hours, advisory hours, any type of business support, you’re really talking like four to five thousand distinct clients,” she said.

“Then you have clients that would have received any number of those categories collective, so the reach of this ecosystem is extremely significant. I think it’s good that we’re now tracking the data. We’re talking about over 40 industries, over 16 islands and almost $70 million through the collective work of the ecosystem.”

According to Bain, 68 percent of that funding was in the form of guaranteed or direct loans, 21 percent in the form of government grants, nine percent in the form of micro loans and two percent from equity contributions.

“That ecosystem would have provided the $68 million in approvals through different types of funding. The venture fund would have done around $1 million plus. This year, according to our budget, we expect a much larger amount of equity investments from our equity partner. Guaranteed loans and direct loans, which would have included the business continuity loans, obviously is the lion share, as we’re trying to pull ourselves out of the pandemic, with micro loans about ten percent,” she said.

“And then government grants was a significant portion of this funding, which accounted for 21 percent of this funding.”

The Minnis administration has committed to expanding the level of small business support from the government by vowing to make $250 million in financing available to the SBDC over the next five years.

The government allocated $35 million in the 2021/2022 budget to support the SBDC.

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/sbdc-68-mil-spent-to-date-funding-small-businesses/