"Rural Entrepreneur" is Gapi's new initiative, in partnership with the Mozambican Chamber of Commerce (CCM), launched on the occasion of Mozambican Women's Day.

This initiative, called the Rural Entrepreneur Project (PER), aims to help promote women's entrepreneurship in rural and peri-urban areas and is being launched with a fund of 30 million Meticais, open to the participation of other entities.

This project is the first activity in an agreement that these two institutions have decided to establish to support the improvement of the competitiveness and resilience of small businesses.

The launch of the PER was accompanied by the first funding to a young woman entrepreneur, in the amount of one million two hundred thousand meticais, and was applauded by several individuals, including dozens of women entrepreneurs, who were taking part in the "Praising Women" event held as part of the Women's Week organized by the CCM.

Speaking at the event, Álvaro Massinga, president of CCM and one of the signatories of the agreement, said that "the combination of efforts and resources between a development finance institution - Gapi-SI - and a business promotion entity - CCM - has great potential to generate synergies with an impact on the country's economic development and, in particular, on the expansion and consolidation of private business initiatives".

For Gapi's part, the chairman of the Executive Committee, Adolfo Muholove, stressed that the partnership between these two institutions "stems from Gapi's strategy and mission, which prioritizes the design and implementation of projects that contribute to a more inclusive and sustainable economic development of Mozambique and that motivate the collaboration of other national governmental or private entities, as well as financial institutions and bilateral and multilateral cooperation. For this reason, this project is open to the participation of other entities".

In the words of the leaders of the two institutions, it became clear that the motto for the CCM-Gapi agreement is based on the need for partnerships between national institutions, capable of implementing programs and projects focused on promoting the small and medium-sized private sector and generating jobs.

The terms of the agreement between the two institutions highlight the fact that CCM includes a significant number of companies from different sectors and sizes and aims to promote business, in particular the modernization of agriculture and its entire production chain, as well as boosting the country's industrialization efforts; on the other hand, Gapi is a financial institution with a national presence and more than three decades of experience in managing and implementing development projects focused on small businesses.

Leonor Sitoe, the PER coordinator, told the audience that "we are now starting a pilot phase which will last three months and have an initial budget of 30 million Meticais. At this stage and with this initial budget, the intervention will be limited to the provinces of Inhambane, Gaza and Maputo".

Speaking about the characteristics of this project, Sitoe said that "in order to improve the success rate of these businesses, in addition to the resources for granting credit, the project will include a component of technical assistance services focused on business management and development, as well as a specific service to support the formalization of businesses in order to improve the eligibility and bankability of income activities carried out by women".

In order to expand the scope of this project, Gapi and CCM will immediately work with other available and interested entities to join this initiative for a more inclusive development of the whole of Mozambique.