The Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Smea) has called for the establishment of a parliamentary committee on SMEs to ensure that issues affecting the sector are properly attended to in the country.<\/p>\n
Smea president James Chiutsi said SMEs can benefit from improved government consideration if there was a Parliamentary Committee to help in the lobbying of resources and policies for the sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cSMEs currently lack policies and are operating in an environment of uncertainty,\u201d said Chiutsi.<\/p>\n
He said the sector requires alot of government support on matters such as land, access to finance, training, markets and that all these can be addressed through a pragmatic approach, including the setting up of a Parliamentary Committee on SMEs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the central business districts of Limbe and Blantyre for example, all the prime land is in the hands of foreigners and SMEs are operating in indecent premises,\u201d claimed Chiutsi.<\/p>\n
He said skills development is also very low in the country\u2019s SME sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cKnowledge and simple technologies to add value to the raw produce is not easily and readily available,\u201d said Chiutsi.<\/p>\n
He said the lack of knowledge and technology is leading to small scale farmers employing centuries\u2019 old methods in their work, citing agriculture where producers use primitive methods in the storage of their harvests, leading to sizable losses to already harvested produce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Smea) has called for the establishment of a parliamentary committee on SMEs to ensure that issues affecting the sector are properly attended to in the country. Smea president James Chiutsi said SMEs can benefit from improved government consideration if there was a Parliamentary Committee to help in the lobbying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7818,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813\/revisions\/7818"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}