Caribbean Export and Development Agency, the regional organization for trade investment development and promotion, was in Belize today to hold a workshop for small business owners in Belize who have aspirations to expand and export their services.
It's part of the agency's program where prospective private sector members can access funding under the Direct Assistance Scheme, and today 7News stopped by the all-day seminar to speak to one of the facilitators.
He told us that there are some strict requirements that the business owners must meet, but it represents a major opportunities for these companies:
Christoper McNair - Facilitator, Caribbean Export Development Agency
"What we're doing this time around in Belize, is we are doing a direct assistant grant proposal workshop. We have a mechanism called 'The Direct assistant Scheme' that provide grant funding to small companies looking to export their services and products. So what we are doing here is actually teaching people how to prepare their proposal for submissions to the process to be considered a grant. We have two funding mechanism under the grant, we have what we call 'Accelerated', that goes up to about 5,000 Euros, then we have the regular program which goes up to 30,000 Euros. On the last call we had, last year, we had five companies from Belize benefiting from under the scheme. We thought Belize as an importan partner for us, we thought it was important to come back here to work again with the firms to build their capacity to write better proposals to further benefit from the program. So that is essentially why we are here.
Obviously we have some requirements. You have to be in business for two years, be a registered business in your domicile, in your country. You have to be exporting or looking to export. So if you're not exporting as yet but you're looking to build your capacity to export then you can go ahead. And fundamentally basically these are our core criteria for application. Obviously you have to be a Cariforum organization or an entity, so you have to be based in one of the 15 countries of Cariforum and Belize is obviously one of those."
The Direct Assistance Scheme, which is funded by the European Union, disbursed 2.5 million European dollars last year, and is earmarked a budget close to that amount for this year's candidates.
Email
Print