By Malum Nalu - 10th May 2006

Papua New Guinea now has a window of opportunity for its small and medium enterprise sector to international markets. This follows the launch of the Small
Business Development Corporation website by Trade and Industry Minister Hon. Paul Tiensten on Thursday, January 26.

The SBDC website - www.sbdc.gov.pg - is a deliberate attempt by the organisation to assist the SME sector to have access to relevant market and business information. “Our main aim is to promote SMEs to enable indigenous Papua New Guineans to be self-sufficient, thus improving their standard of living and contributing to the development of the country,” says SBDC managing director Mr. Brian Kiap Komun.

“We are the Government’s lead agency in the promotion of its SME Policy. “The challenge on SBDC, therefore, is both an exciting and challenging one, especially in this day and age of information technology and globalisation.” Minister Tiensten says the website will hopefully be a window for PNG’s SME sector to the world as well as open up new international markets for the country. “It is recognised and has been raised or discussed in many national forums and seminars in Papua New Guinea about the lack of access to relevant market and business information,” he said. “Even the current SME Policy identifies Information access as one of the constraints to SME development in PNG. “It has also been realised that a lot of information is institutionally driven rather than market, industry or sectoral driven. “It has been highlighted in many APEC SME related forums and meetings that PNG is lagging behind in terms of having an official SME website or portal. “In other words, of the 21 APEC economies, PNG is the only economy that does not have an official government SME Website, ranks poorly in terms of ICT infrastructure, ICT application and no national policy on informatisation. “Most of the other APEC member economies are in the advanced stages of having a highly informatised SME Sector. “The use of ICT in business is the way of the future and unless we as an economy vigorously pursue and embrace this we may find ourselves missing out on market opportunities due to globalisation.

“Given this back drop, there is a room for lot of improvement by PNG in terms of ICT awareness creation, as well as ICT ownership and application by business and commerce in keeping with global trends. “This project/initiative is being undertaken by SBDC in an attempt or effort to address the lack of access to market/relevant business information by the SME Sector. “Nonetheless, the overall issue of informatisation cannot be solved by a single entity such as SBDC and needs a more concerted push on a national scale by the government.” The project aims:

• To comply with APEC action agendas and requirements on informatisation and establishment of official SME website;
• To respond to global trends in e-business, e-commerce and e-government etc;
• To ensure that there is a website for the SME Sector to access market information, create opportunities for business matching and real-time information on such matters;
• To enable access to the public and SME sector information on available financial products and services, SME business tends, trade/industry data and statistics;
• To provide information on SBDC, its products and services;
• To access and increase knowledge and understanding on SME development policies, strategies and methodologies by drawing on the best practices of the leading APEC member economies;
• To facilitate and host successful SMEs and SBDC’s Small Enterprise Development (SED) network partners; and
• To create linkages with other government websites.

Project beneficiaries will be the SME Sector, SED Network partners and others outlined above.

The website will provide:

• Data bank/mine of SME related information on markets, business/trade data, trends and statistics, financial products and services.

• Real-time information on business matching and market opportunities globally.

• Knowledge bank of world/APEC economies best practices on policies, programmes, strategies and methodologies on SME development.

• Window to the global economy by our SMEs, whilst other SMEs in the APEC economies accessing our SME sector.

Last year the SBDC called for tenders to develop the website. The successful tenderer was Masalai Communications, a 100 per cent locally owned company run by young IT entrepreneur, Mr Emmanuel Narakobi. Masalai Communications commenced work on designing and developing the website, which was then successfully tested.Following the launching by Mr. Tiensten, SBDC staff will continue to regularly update the website for the benefit of the SME sector.