… Financial Inclusion for emaSwati
BY DELISA THWALA
MBABANE– The Centre for Financial Inclusion (CFI) In collaboration with the Ministries of Finance and Commerce, Industry and Trade have launched the second blended FinScope MSMEs survey Eswatini.
This took place at Royal Villas Hotel, earlier today. The last FinScope MSMES survey Eswatini was last done in 2017.
The Chief Executive Officer Nomcebo Sherron Hadebe said the Centre for Financial Inclusion (CFI) as part of implementation of the FINCLUDE Project has a number of agreements.
These include Eswatini National Agricultural Union, Eswatini Bank, Imbita Women’s, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Commerce Industry and Trade.
She said the Finance Trust aims to ensure that the beneficiaries of the FINCLUDE Project that have been trained on aspects of both smart agriculture and financial inclusion have an opportunity to access affordable finance.
“While we aim to assist these beneficiaries, we are desirous to integrate them into mainstream finance post this assistance. the implementation of FINCLUDE we have ascertained that are between the ages of 18-35 are resource constraints and face many barriers that inhibit their growth,” she said.
Worth noting is that the determinant factors of financial inclusion are income, education, age, and gender. The determinant factors of the main indicator of financial inclusion are formal account, formal saving, and formal credit.
Hadebe said countries are seeking new ways to address complex and interconnected challenges. Fulfilling the promise of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires multi-sectoral approaches that bring together expertise from a range of perspectives.
“By harnessing our comparative advantage and working within the context of our respective mandates, we can collectively make significant progress towards realising the vision of the SDGs,” she said.
In addition she said financial inclusion is increasingly positioned as an enabler of broader development goals, in support of the SDGs.
Adding that more and more countries are including an inclusive financial sector as a key objective in their national development plans, and this tendency is further underpinned by the G20 leadership of financial inclusion, which highlights the ongoing relevance of the SDGs and nationally led financial inclusion efforts.
Furthermore, financial markets play a vital role in creating a sustainable future.
It is worth mentioning that The Government of Eswatini has been working towards the development of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector.
This is clear from the SMME Policy (2009), Micro Finance policy, Financial Sector Development Implementation Plan, Financial Sector Development Strategy and National Financial Inclusion Strategy.
Thus in trying to understand and unlock the full potential of the sector, a FinScope MSME survey was conducted between October 2016 and March 2017.
The main objective was to size and scope the MSMEs in Eswatini while describing the levels of access to financial products and services (both formal and informal.
When speaking on this Hadebe said the study also attempted to identify the most binding constraints to MSME development with a focus on access to financial markets.
“The study also segmented the MSME sector into different categories in an effort to identify the needs of each segment and come up with recommendations for promotion of the segments. The following useful insights have been gained,” she said.
In addition to that, she said people which is the overall Eswatini MSME sector was estimated to consist of 59 283 business owners (10 percent of the population own MSMEs) and employs approximately 93 000 people (16 percent of the total working age population) MSME business owners in Eswatini.
These are typically local citizens who are 35 years or older. Most are married under customary or traditional law and reside in properties that they fully own. “It was found that MSME business owners are the head of the household and 74 percent are based in rural areas. There are more female MSME business owners (65 percent) than male business owners 135 percent), with most identifying as individual entrepreneurs. Three quarters (75 percent) rely on their business as their only source of personal income,” she said.
