As part of the USAID-funded Financial Sector Knowledge Sharing Project (“FS Share”), Crimson Capital has completed a primer on SME access to finance. Crimson contributes to the FS Share project under a subcontract to Chemonics International.

The objective of primer is to provide technical assistance program designers with a basis of understanding of approaches to enable access to financing for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets. The primer discuss the challenges that SMEs face in gaining access to finance and the opportunities for overcoming these obstacles in order to make finance more readily accessible in developing countries. After discussing capital markets and traditional bank lending, the primer illustrates how innovative financing techniques, such as purchase-order finance, factoring, leasing, etc. can be used to make credit available to companies that have good potential but have difficulties accessing traditional types of bank finance. The primer also demonstrates how USAID Development Credit Authority (DCA) credit guarantees can be used to enlarge SME’s access to finance and presents four case studies that illustrate ways in which financing techniques, including DCA guarantees, have been used in emerging markets.

Crimson Capital CEO, Michael Gold, presented the SME Access to Finance Primer on September 16, 2009 at Chemonics’ offices in Washington, DC. The presentation was attended by USAID, USAID DCA, US treasury and other SME finance practitioners.

To download the SME Access to Finance Primer, view the presentation, or listen to and view a screen cast of the presentation, please go to www.fsshare.org/content/sme-finance

SME-Access-to-Finance.pdf