Sri Lanka_Enhancing Rural Micro and Small-Sized Enterprises Finance

MSME finance policy experts (one international, 2 person-months, intermittent; one national, 6 person-months, intermittent).

The main role of the MSME finance policy experts is to draft a white paper evaluating the effectiveness of government MSME support program, including interest subsidies, credit guarantees, and refinancing facilities with an emphasis on those programs’ impact on women borrowers. The MSME finance policy experts will be responsible for carrying out the following tasks to ensure comprehensiveness of the evaluation within limited resources:

• identify all government MSME financial inclusion programs that had been implemented for at least 12 months as of 1 January 2018;
• identify key criteria to assess the effectiveness of the programs;
• categorize those MSME financial inclusion programs, using quantitative data, focus groups, surveys, and interviews, broadly into those that were (a) unsuccessful and should be discontinued, (b) partially successful and should be either discontinued or reformed, and (c) successful and should be expanded;
• identify key general lessons learned and recommendations that should be applied to future initiatives;
• develop the policy actions with their rationale for a policy matrix for a potential ADB sector development program on improving the enabling environment for MSMEs’ access to finance; and
• disseminate key research findings at a stakeholder workshop in Colombo and through a publication of an ADB working paper.