COVID-19: from managing loans to renegotiating contracts and new funding opportunities

MARKUP training through the International Trade Centre (ITC) for SMEs to improve their access to finance continues under the COVID19 crisis. Online bootcamps will launch a fresh round of Access to Finance (A2F) in July 2020.

In the meantime, business development service (BDS) providers are offering advisory services to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) they have been working with over the past year. MARKUP trained over 115 SMEs across the five EAC countries and some of them successfully received loans from financial institutions. COVID-19 has raised a new series of questions for companies. BDS providers are remotely advising SMEs not only on ways to ensure that their financials are up to date, monitoring their numbers, renegotiating payment terms and discussing loan commitments with banks, negotiating with debtors but also updating cash flows to forecast the impact of cuts on sales.