BEEP Helps Ninety-Five Businesses Break Through

For many small business owners, getting access to funding can be the difference between standing still and growing. Through the Belize Enterprise Empowerment Project (BEEP), ninety-five entrepreneurs across the country got that opportunity, receiving not only financial support but also the tools and training needed to strengthen their businesses. Funded by the CARICOM Development Fund and implemented by BELTRAIDE, the program paired grants with mentorship, business development training and advisory services. Now, as the initiative comes to an end, Monique Usher, Deputy Executive Director of BELTRAIDE, says its real success lies in helping entrepreneurs build stronger, more sustainable businesses for the future.

 

Monique Usher, Deputy Executive Director, BELTRAIDE

“This specific cohort is very unique. For the BEEP program in specific, we also looked at capturing persons that operate within the creative industry, the orange economy. So we have persons that are artisans, we have persons that offer services, whether it’s floral arrangement, funeral services. We have persons that offer digital marketing services, product-based, businesses also. So it’s an array of businesses, and something important to note is that BELTRAIDE is supporting these business from the onset. So we’ve had them become clients of BELTRAIDE. They’ve been receiving advisory support, additional programs that are beneficial to our clients, we also promote to them. This program in specific looked at access to finance. However, we realized that to have these businesses invest in their enterprises, we also need to couple it with business advisory training. So we did tailored business advisory training that perhaps businesses have been in operation for years, have not had any formal capacity building initiative, and so we’ve looked at addressing that deficiency. In addition to that, we’ve also taken another step with looking at the formalization steps that businesses would need to engage in. So we may have had a startup approach us in the onset, and they were not formalized, so the program also assisted them with the guidance to formalize their enterprise and look at scaling up. Because we started off with startup the idea is to have them see the maturing enterprises as aspirational. And of course, the companies that are exporting, it’s also an opportunity for them to share, learn about you know, the entrepreneurial journey for each of their fellow enterprises.”

 

The program disbursed nearly seven hundred eighty-eight thousand dollars to ninety-five businesses, but credits its success not only to financial assistance, but also to the training, advisory services, and partnerships with business support organizations that helped entrepreneurs strengthen and grow their enterprises.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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