Zakia Ferdoush, an entrepreneur from Rangpur, ran after a number of banks for at least a year to borrow Tk 5 lakh she urgently needed to expand her business, but lenders did not pay heed to her plea. “I applied with different lenders, but they denied me repeatedly as I was a woman. At one stage, frustration took over and I was forced to give up the hope to get the loan,” she said, while sharing her bitter experiences at a roundtable in Dhaka yesterday. The WEESMS, a project that is being implemented jointly by the iDE and The Asia Foundation, organised the event titled “Bangladesh Bank’s SME Policy: Access to Finance for Women SMEs” at The Daily Star Centre. Banks have hardly followed the central bank’s guidelines related to SME loan disbursement and they do not offer a grace period of three to six months to women entrepreneurs, said Ferdoush, the proprietor of Neel Oporazita Boutiques. The central bank earlier asked banks to set up dedicated help desks for women entrepreneurs, but a majority of them did not comply, she said. In most cases, lenders want to know the identity of the husband of women entrepreneurs, which is utterly disgraceful, she said. “This is a male-dominated world and the attitude is reflected when financial institutions take decisions whether a female entrepreneur will be given a loan or not. But banks should judge us as entrepreneurs,” she said. Three other women entrepreneurs from outside of Dhaka echoed Ferdoush. They said they have already knocked a number of banks but many of them said they did not provide SME loans to female entrepreneurs. Nurunnahar Lily, an entrepreneur from Khulna, alleged that some banks had asked her to manage a first class government official as a guarantor to secure SME loans. “The story did not end there as the banks also sought the salary statement of the guarantor. It is quite tough to find out such a guarantor,” she said. The central bank instructed banks to give out Tk 25 lakh in SME loans to women entrepreneurs without any collateral. “On the contrary, the majority of the female entrepreneurs are deprived of any amount of loans from banks,” Lily said. But the credit repayment by women entrepreneur is almost 95 percent, which is much better than those of other sectors, she said. SK Sur Chowdhury, banking reform adviser of the central bank, said that banks usually showed a host of excuses when they took decisions not to provide loans to female entrepreneurs. “There is no requirement to manage a government official as guarantor for SME loans. This is a complete violation of the central bank policy,” he said. He suggested female entrepreneurs file complaint with the central bank if they face any hassles in availing SME loans. “Women entrepreneurs should keep the central bank’s SME guidelines when they bargain with banks,” said Chowdhury, also a former deputy governor of the central bank. Mohammed Abu Eusuf, a professor at the University of Dhaka’s development studies department, said that a tiny portion of SME loans usually went to women entrepreneurs. Between January and June this year, banks and non-bank financial institutions disbursed Tk 79,984 crore in SME loans, of which only 7.35 percent was given out to female entrepreneurs. “The central bank can take an initiative to introduce a target-based approach so that lenders are forced to give out a certain amount of loans to female entrepreneurs,” said Prof Eusuf, also the executive director of the Research and Policy Integration for Development, a research organisation. K Faisal Bin Seraj, country representative of The Asia Foundation, said blockchain-based technology could help mitigate the existing problem faced by women entrepreneurs.
Source – The Daily Star.
