Benefits of The Awards

Award winning SMEs and their shareholders/owners and their managers would be recognized by their actual and potential trade counterparties, investment partners/recipients, and other key stakeholders as exceptional and therefore worthy clients /business partners and counterparties. This would in effect lower the costs charged them by business support service providers due to lower perceived associated risks. For instance they would get more access to loan finance and at lower interest costs as well. In similar vein they could benefit from lower insurance premium tariffs and would more appealing to private placement investors in their shares and would even become a more attractive proposition to equity investors should a public offer towards a listing on the stock market be decided on.

Also, winners would find it easier to secure partners in targeted new markets for their goods and services, and on better terms of partnership as well. In turn this would thus increase the possibility to actually entering new product/service markets all across Africa – as well as in their own home jurisdictions – with commercial success. Furthermore regulators would have more confidence in them while business facilitation institutions would show more willingness to support them.

In all, award winners would consequently enjoy lower business costs and higher levels of business support and both business to business and end user market patronage for their goods and services as well as more attractiveness to the best manpower talent and both equity and debt financiers – all of this on both sovereign national and pan-African basis.

Benefits to Participants

By winning an award, awardees would automatically qualify to participate in the impending pan African SME conference which would also be of immense benefit to them as participants.

Their participation would enable them to join a unique pan continental platform that would allow them meet and network with their counterparts from all around the continent. This would enable them learn both new technical skills and managerial practices, based on proven successful ideas and techniques that have not been put in the public domain anywhere in the form of books or working papers. Similarly they would learn from the practical experiences of other participants, what works and what does not work.

Just as importantly participants would have the opportunity to join both domestic and cross-border supply/value chains comprising members who have exemplary capacities and performance which in turn creates extraordinarily efficient supply/value chains to the benefit of all their members. Such supply chains would also open the doors for members to enter into new markets, both domestic and cross-border leveraging on the newly formed relationships with enterprises and individuals already operating and indeed acclaimed in those targeted new markets. In similar fashion participants stand to get access to new sources of supply of key production inputs through their newly formed relationships with award winning enterprises and individuals in markets that can supply such inputs.

Participants also stand to secure the goodwill of regulators - who also are participants at the conference - both in their home jurisdictions and other African jurisdictions as well.