Decisive decade

Tamkeen celebrated its 10th anniversary alongside entrepreneurs, businesses and employees it has helped flourish over the years by staging a consultation forum to share its achievements, as well as to discuss ways on how to develop in the future.

More than 400 people attended the annual forum themed ‘A Decade of Dedication for a Better Bahrain’ at the Sofitel Bahrain Zallaq Thalassa Sea & Spa on Monday.

Tamkeen is a semi-government organisation established as part of the country’s national reform initiatives, with the task of making the private sector as the key driver of sustainable economic development.

To date, it has served more than 130,000 Bahrainis and businesses. It has launched more than 200 initiatives, from which more than 100,000 individuals and 38,000 enterprises have benefited.

Dr Nasser Qaedi, Tamkeen’s executive director- planning and business development, said: “Since its foundation, Tamkeen has been mandated to carry out public consultations in order to validate its activities and projects with the public prior to the launch of them.

“What we are trying to do is engage with the public as much as possible and with the stakeholders of the private sector to get their views and feedback on what and where they would like to see Tamkeen pay more attention to.

“It’s very important to bring in all the necessary stakeholders to create a very inclusive way of looking at how we can resolve common challenges, look at opportunities together and how we can build a unified approach to tackling these issues.

“At this forum, we attracted a good cross-section of people. We have small to medium enterprises, we have large businesses, we have employees and we have young people. We are trying to capture as many different points of view as possible.”

The organisers of the event were delighted with the turn out and the participants were active in telling Tamkeen what they feel, what they are going through and how the organisation can help.

“We take all the feedback from these consultations, review them internally and try to engineer new solutions around things that we might find that are missing, things that we need to improve and remove or eliminate things that maybe we need to discontinue,” added Nasser. “We are constantly learning, evolving and trying to improve.”

The organisation’s diversified initiatives include grants, finance solutions and advisory services, all designed to develop the productivity of individuals and enterprises and enable them to compete locally and globally.

Tamkeen has also allocated 47 per cent of its customer support to empower Bahraini women through training as well as entrepreneurship and business support schemes. Four parallel sessions were staged to receive the feedback from its start-up and scale-up businesses, its large businesses, youth and job seekers and employees.

Dr Nasser added: “We are not going to have a blanket approach to the economy - we understand that there are different needs and we are respectful of that.” To simplify applications to its programmes, Tamkeen has introduced an interactive portal, multiple public communication channels, customer service and call centres, social media networks, as well as a variety of activities and nationwide business road shows.

It also launched a new financing scheme entitled ‘Tamweel +’ which is a BD40 million Sharia-compliant portfolio offered in partnership with Al Baraka Islamic Bank and Ithmaar Bank.

The programme provides financing within the range of BD1million to a maximum of BD2.5million, with a repayment period of up to 10 years.