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SMEs law to be ready by June
ABU DHABI — A draft law to set up small and medium enterprises, or SMEs, in the UAE on a fast-tracked basis is likely to be ready by June.
This was stated in the capital on Monday by Ahmed Khalil Al Mutawa, Chief Executive Officer of the Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development, which has been set up by the Government of Abu Dhabi to cultivate entrepreneurship and catalyse the development of the UAE’s SME sector.
He said the new law, being prepared by the Ministry of Economy, would define the capital required for SMEs, and would seek to further reduce the bureaucratic and financial hurdles in the development of the sector.
The SME sector has been making significant growth in the UAE in spite of the global financial crisis. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Report 2009, the UAE had the highest increase in new SME start-ups last year.
The country was also tops in terms of the number of people thinking entrepreneurship as a good carrier.
Another interesting finding in the Report was that most of the increase in business start-up activities were from Emiratis, and being self-employed was emerging as an alternative to Emiratisation in the country’s private sector, Al Mutawa said.
So far, the Khalifa Fund has provided Dh350 million for 211 projects in the SME sector since its inception in 2007.
“We are planning to fund 60 projects this year and each of them would have an outlay of about Dh1.5 million,” Al Mutawa said in response to questions from Khaleej Times on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi Forum on Entrepreneurship, jointly organised by the Khalifa Fund and the Abu Dhabi University.
The contribution of SMEs to the GDP of Abu Dhabi is expected to touch about 30 to 40 per cent by 2030, he said.
The Khalifa Fund is also introducing innovative funding programmes in collaboration with banks and other financial institutions.
Women entrepreneurs
There is a “welcome growth” in women entrepreneurs in the UAE, according to Al Mutawa. The Khalifa Fund has received about 4,000 applications for SME startups in the UAE so far, and about one-third of them are women.
Also, 25 per cent of these projects financed by the Khalifa Fundand about 40 per cent of SME applicants trained by theFund are women entrepreneurs.
Of the total applications received by the Khalifa Fund, 56 per cent are in the services sector, while 37 per cent are in industrial and the remaining seven per cent in agriculture, he said.
Earlier speaking as the guest of honour at the Forum, Mohammed Omar Abdullah, Undersecretary of the Department of Economic Developmentsaid, “entrepreneurship is a vital component of Abu Dhabi Vision 2030. SMEs,which comprise 46 per cent of our economy, are essential contributors towards sustainable development and economic diversification of the emirate and of the country as a whole.”
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