Bahrain to take 10% of all public contracts to SMEs
The Bahrain government has been taking some serious measures to boost the country’s SME sector, and now the cabinet has decided to introduce a new quota on all public tenders, catering to the small and medium enterprises.
At present, a 10 percent quota for SMEs exists on auctions only for service facilities at government enterprise, but the introduction of the new mandate will expand the quota to all types of public tenders, making it easier for SMEs to get more government deals. The Gulf Daily News has confirmed the new mandate on their website.
This is not the first time quotas have been implemented or extended to support SMEs in the region. Expo 2020 Dubai took place in March in the UAE, and half of all the contracts related to the event were awarded to SMEs.
“So far we have over 26,000 registered suppliers from one hundred and fifty countries wanting to do business with Expo. 75 percent of those companies are actual SMEs,” Tina Ghanem, director of Expo 2020’s Online Marketplace (OMP), said in March during a presentation at the Arabian Business Startup Academy in Dubai.
In addition, the Central Bank of Egypt in January 2016 announced that all the banks in the country are bound to lend a minimum of 20 percent of all their loans to SMEs by the end of 2020.
It is quite refreshing for the startup scene of the region as governments and public entities are taking the new entrepreneurs very seriously, bringing convenient changes and policies to support them.
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