Dionne Rose, Business Reporter

Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett speaking at the AmCham luncheon, Hilton Kingston hotel, New Kingston, May 22. Seated from left are Earl Jarrett and AmCham president, Audrey Marks-Dunstan. - Ian Allen/Staff Photographer

The government has earmarked $100 million for tourism-related loans to the micro sector and has tapped Jamaica National Building Society as partner to manage the fund.

On Friday, Frank Whylie, the head of JN Small Business, said the company was still waiting for the tourism ministry to sign off on the deal.

Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett said the project is about helping the "little people" with skills but have no money to develop their ideas.

converting ideas

"Tourism is a about converting ideas into experience and there is a cost to this that most of our little people don't have the resources to bear, but they have the ideas, the powerful ideas in their heads," said Bartlett.

"So, in your community, if you have an idea where you can convert a straw into a basket, come and talk with me; you can convert some oranges into orange juice, come and talk with me ... What we are saying to the little man, tourism is for you."

Bartlett, who announced the plan while addressing top industry leaders at the monthly AmCham speaker's forum luncheon in Kingston, is attempting to position tourism as a sector that locals can look to for business opportunity, and not just employment - to create jobs instead of joining others' payrolls.

What entrepreneurs require, he said, is access to funding for their ideas.Loans from the new tourism business fund will be capped at $3 million and offered at three per cent per annum, with five years to repay.

The only collateral required, Bartlett said, is a promissory note or character reference.

Bartlett later told Sunday Business that persons already registered with the Tourism Product Development Company can access the loan immediately.

Under the agreement, persons who require it can get 30 per cent of the loan to bring their businesses into compliance with requirements for a registered company, including application for a Tax Compliance Certificate (TCC).

retooling

"At the moment, the loans that have been provided for the small and medium-size enterprises have really not been taken up and this is one of the reasons why we have been retooling, and looking at what are the big obstacles, and one of the big obstacles we found was TCC," said Bartlett.

"Which is why we said, okay, fine, you have a TCC problem, come, we are going to give you a loan where 30 per cent of that can be used to clean up your tax-compliance arrears and put yourself in a position to move forward and never get back in those arrears."

dionne.rose@gleanerjm .com