SIF DISBURSES GH¢4,231,910 MICRO FINANCE LOANS (PAGE 35)

AS part of the efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing poverty in the country to the barest minimum, the Social Investment Fund (SIF) in collaboration with its development partners, has disbursed a total of GH¢4,231,910 as micro finance loans to their target beneficiaries throughout the country.
The facility was distributed through 32 micro financial institutions.
The Executive Director of the SIF, Mrs Ama Serwaa Dapaah, made this known at an annual review meeting at Fumesua last Tuesday.
The seminar was to afford the SIF the opportunity to identify all bottlenecks undermining the effective implementation of the programme.
According to Mrs Dapaa, out of the 118 infrastructural projects approved for construction in the country, 69 of them, representing 60.39 per cent, had been completed.
The completed projects include classroom blocks, teachers and nurses’ bungalows, rural clinics and boreholes.
The Poverty Reduction Project (PRP) is a five-year project put forward in line with the government's comprehensive poverty reduction programme designed to improve the livelihood of both the urban and rural impoverished communities through three key interventions.
Among the interventions is a micro finance capitalisation, which supports productive and income generation activities through a revolving credit programme made available to indigenous micro-finance institutions for on-lending to the productive poor.
It also comprises a sub-project financing, which tackles the improvement of access to basic social, economic and infrastructural services.
Mrs Serwaa Dapaah stated that her outfit was confronted with some challenges that included the irregular payment of contractors' invoices submitted for work done.
She explained that the irregular payment of the contractors had seriously affected sub-project implementation.
She said complaints from clients about the short repayment period of loans regarding micro financing was also a challenge that needed to be properly addressed.
The executive director called on the stakeholders to explore other avenues that would effectively expand the SIF resource mobilisation base in the medium to long term in order to make the organisation self-sustaining.