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Nassau, The Bahamas – On March 24, 2011, the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC) launched the technical assistance phase of the FINPYME program in The Bahamas, in collaboration with the Bahamas Chamber of Commerceand Employers Confederation and Scotiabank.

FINPYME, an IIC technical assistance program financed by the Korea-IIC SME Development Trust Fund, is a diagnostic tool for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) intended to help them improve their competitiveness and facilitate their access to potential sources of financing.

This new phase of the FINPYME program began with a two-day program: a group-based workshop which dealt with issues surrounding family governance, focusing on succession planning for SMEs; and individual sessions where companies had a chance to review their own situation. The workshop was delivered by the MONA School of Business at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

FINPYME has already been implemented in Central America and Colombia and has been launched in five countries of the English-speaking Caribbean: The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Companies participating in this program are active in many different sectors, such as agriculture and agribusiness, financial services, general manufacturing, and tourism and hotels. The IIC has already provided group technical assistance workshops to participating SMEs in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Belize. SMEs participating in those workshops benefited from sessions on customer relationships and marketing, among other topics, where they were given a toolkit. For more information on the FINPYME Program, please visit www.iic.int/finpyme.

Thanks to funding from the Republic of Korea, many of these SMEs are eligible to receive individual technical assistance designed to assist them in resolving some of the operational problems highlighted in their diagnostics. In addition, all companies are invited to group technical assistance sessions consisting of a series of practical workshops where the participating companies will be sharing experiences.

About the IIC

The IIC is a multilateral financial institution that is a member of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Group. The IIC’s mission is to promote the economic development of its regional member countries by encouraging the establishment, expansion, and modernization of private enterprises, particularly those that are small and medium in size. It does so by providing financing (in the form of equity investments, loans, guarantees, and other instruments) and advisory services to private enterprises in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2010, the IIC reached US$1.4 billion in assets and approved forty-nine operations channeling US$374.8 million to SMEs in the region For more information on the IIC’s activities, please visit www.iic.int.