The Federal Government has disclosed that it will kick start disbursement of the N75 billion support grants to Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises that are eligible to partake in the COVID-19 support scheme. Accordingly, on September 10, the Federal Government inaugurated two schemes to support about 1.7 million Medium and Small Scale Enterprise (MSMEs) financially across the country with N75billion naira.
The government revealed that the fund called survival fund was an effort to support the MSMEs as a stimulus to save the MSMEs from folding up following the pandemic that hit the economy globally.
Tola Adekunle, the Special Assistant to the President on the MSMEs, office of the Vice President who is also the Coordinator, Survival Fund disclosed this to newsmen in Abuja yesterday that the fund will be paid this week.
According to him, the office will be paying this money in batches of 12 states at a time so that the disbursement can be monitored strictly and that within the week 12 states would have been settled.
Adekunle said, “We are starting with the artisans and it is 4,500 persons per state, plus 4,500 for transporters, bringing it to about 9,000 for each state. Right now, we have about 54,000 from 12 states.”
When he was asked whether those on their payroll would instantly receive an alert, Adekunle replied by the end of the month they would be good to go.
He revealed it was designed such that when the federal staff started getting their salaries, they will receive there’s at the same time, subsequently, batch two and three would follow in November and December respectively.
Adekunle said the beneficiaries would receive between N30,000 to N50,000, specifically taking over the liability of ten staff out of fifty employees.
He further explained that when the payroll support was inaugurated on September 21 and the portal was opened by 11 pm, adding that within 24 hours about 132,000 applicants were recorded.
The number of states that have met the quotas was nearly twenty states and that necessitated the need for an extension, the coordinator said.
Meanwhile, he revealed the number of applicants to benefit from the scheme is about 432,000 businesses but about 70,000 businesses had qualified for the fund.
