The Credit Portion Of UMKM RI Is Still Low, The Minister Of Agriculture Compares With Neighboring Countries

Minister of Cooperatives and SMEs, Teten Masduki. (Photo: Dpk. Setkab)

JAKARTA - Minister of Cooperatives and SMEs Teten Masduki said that the portion of bank credit disbursed to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) nationally is still low. The reason is, currently the provision of credit to the MSME sector is only around 18 percent to 20 percent.

"We are relatively the lowest, for example Singapore has 39 percent of the credit portion for their MSMEs. Then, Malaysia is 50 percent, Thailand is above 50 percent, and South Korea is 81 percent, "he said in a webinar on Building Ecosystems and Financial Access for MSMEs, Thursday, May 6.

For this reason, Teten welcomes President Joko Widodo's initiative to encourage banks to be able to achieve credit disbursement of 30 percent by 2024 in order to advance the small and medium-scale business world.

"So we need to strengthen access to finance so that MSMEs have the opportunity to develop, develop their business capacity, strengthen production competitiveness, so that they can upgrade their grades and contribute more to the national economic structure," he said.

Teten added that in order to achieve this target, the government has now increased the people's business credit ceiling (KUR) from a maximum of Rp. 500 million to Rp. 20 billion.

"We are still discussing the scheme and its implementation and hopefully it will be completed soon," he said.

For information, the government through the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto made several adjustments to the credit distribution scheme to MSMEs.

Some of them are KUR without collateral, which has so far been under Rp. 50 million and then increased to Rp. 100 million.

To note, the realization of KUR throughout 2020 has succeeded in breaking the target of 104 percent with a value of not less than IDR 198.53 trillion.

Meanwhile, in 2021, the value of KUR distribution is targeted to exceed IDR 253 trillion. This amount is an increase from the previous projection of IDR 220 trillion.