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Bank loans still elude micro-enterprises

Suman Saha
The majority of the microentrepreneurs are still excluded from the formal credit market due to banks' unwillingness to extend small loans, a recent study by the Institute of Microfinance (InM) found.
"Bank financing has always been a constraint to the development of micro enterprises, so they somehow manage with own funds or quasi-formal credit from the microfinance institutes
(MFIs)," said MA Baqui Khalily, co-author of the study 'Access to Finance and Productivity of Enterprises'.
Only 8.22 percent of the country's microenterprises currently have access to bank credit, the study found. The need to provide collateral, the banks' stringent terms and conditions and higher transaction costs have been cited as constraints by the micro entrepreneurs surveyed.
Around 51 percent of the micro-enterprises have access to MFIs, which have a network of over 17,000 branches.The study found that the denial to formal credit sets the micro enterprises back in terms of total factor productivity by 176 percent and average labour productivity by 13 percent. It called for innovative measures to bring them to the formal credit market.
"One approach may be involving the microfinance institutions as agents of the formal banks. The measure, we believe, could make the credit market more efficient,"
said Khalily, also the executive director of InM.
Micro and small enterprises use micro creditas main source of external finance, whereas medium and large enterprises use bank credit as main source of external finance, he said.
The InM executive director, therefore, suggested reformulating the policy for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and classifying the enterprises into two broad groups—micro and small enterprises, and medium and large enterprises.
"This will make the credit programme more focused, as it will help Bangladesh Bank monitor the MSMEs' access to credit more effectively."
In Bangladesh, economic entities are dominated by micro-enterprises, accounting for more than 98 percent of the total enterprises. A little over 70 percent of the enterprises are owned by the non-poor, the study found.
Around 71 percent of micro-enterprises are located in rural areas mainly because of the expansion of rural microcredit during the past decade.
The SMEs grew at an annual rate of over 6 percent between 1981 and 2001.
A total of 8,936 households were randomly selected from 275 upazilas in 63 districts across the country for the study.
suman.saha@thedailystar.net