The Chief Executive of the National Board of Small Scale industries says the Coronavirus Alleviation Programme (CAP) is not an opportunity for businesses to expand.

Kosi Yankey-Ayeh speaking at a webinar organised by Ecobank Ghana Limited Friday said it is rather there for businesses to stabilize and thrive within the pandemic.

According to her, some people have been unable to access the CAP because they have failed to give the right reasons why they need the fund and others do not even understand the purpose of the fund.

“We’ve been clear as to this is not the time for expansion but it is a time to actually hold steady and sustain your business and hold your business. So the funds we’re providing goes towards that,” she said.

Ms Yankey-Ayeh said a major problem the NBSSI is facing when it comes to disbursing the funds is differentiating which businesses are genuine and which are not.

Thus, the NBSSI has had to work with participating financial institutions in order to ask the right questions to find out what is real and what is not.

“We’ve had to go through and also go through the process with the participating financial institutions to ask the right questions so we can differentiate from what is genuine and what is not,” she said.

Ms Yankey-Ayeh also stated that the NBSSI has been working closely with Associations trying to use their data to separate the genuine businesses from the others.

“We’ve also realised the need to work with the Associations and it’s one of the things the President announced in March when he said we should work and design a product which will come up to compliment the businesses.”

However, she noted that working with the Associations also posed a challenge because most of them did not have enough data.

“And one of the things we noticed working for the association was that a lot of them did not have data and a lot of them did not have enough data.And so one of the things we had had to do was relying on their data and relying on both the workforce.

“So we’ve been able to work with them now to kind of collate some of the data. But truthfully, it had been a very difficult process in really trying to ascertain what their data really looks like to confirm what we also had within the set up that we have so all of this has had to come up for us to check how genuine the process is or not,” Ms Yankey-Ayeh said.