In a bid to allow women entrepreneurs to further expand their businesses, the South Pacific Business Development will be providing the much needed assistance this year.

Founder and President Gregory Casagrande says their newly introduced small medium enterprise loan products will allow these women to increase their income.

Casagrande says the SME fund will also provide more financial security to improve their business operations.

“These are for our especially successful women micro entrepreneurs who need to further scale their business to a significantly larger size where they will be bringing in a number of employees and have more facilities and so these SME financing is something that we have seen significantly more of in 2018.”

Casagrande says SPBD conducts meeting every week to allow women under their scheme to talk about their business issues, after which SPBD tries to find a solution.

Nine thousand women is currently part of the SPBD scheme, of which 1500 are from the rural areas.