President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo says MASLOC has now been revamped to adhere to strict credit procedures and prudent management of credit recovery processes.

This, he said had resulted in a recovery rate of 89 per cent of loans administered under a pilot scheme introduced in 2017.

The President who said this in his State of Nation Address to Parliament on Thursday added that MASLOC was thus back “to do what it was set up to do”.

He announced that in 2019, MASLOC would give increased attention to youth start-up businesses in vegetable farming, poultry, piggery and fish farming.

According to President Akufo-Addo, small and medium scale enterprises formed the base of businesses in the country, and financing was the bane of their operations.

MASLOC was therefore established in 2006 to meet a critical need by providing the type of small-scale loans needed by the small-scale enterprises at reasonable rates.

Sadly, however, MASLOC was undermined by base political considerations and endemic corruption, and the centre was almost run down completely, the President noted.

He said MASLOC was therefore, given an amount of GH¢35million in October 2018 for disbursement and that it was the first time an amount of such magnitude was given to the Centre outside of an election year.

Of the GH¢35million that were received, the Centre has disbursed GH¢20,563,100, with GH¢14,317,200 to be disbursed for pending applications, which have been approved.

So far, 87 per cent of the monies disbursed have gone to women, made up of 24,582 women.

The President said the 2016 NPP Manifesto promised to allocate 50 per cent of MASLOC funds to women, but Government had surpassed that promise by giving over 80 per cent of the funds to women.

“It has obviously been noticed that interesting things are happening at the successfully restructured MASLOC, and that is why the Centre was allocated an amount of GH¢200 million in the 2019 budget”.

He however said the incidence of bad governance methods that almost collapsed MASLOC had, unfortunately, affected the running of many businesses generally and the financial sector in particular, making the banking sector go through “traumatic upheaval”.

“Again, the woes of the banking sector have also been a case of long-standing bad practices that we, previously, had been unable or unwilling to deal with, which we are now having to deal with in the most painful manner, he noted.

The clean-up has cost the national treasury GH¢12.7 billion, money we can ill afford, but which was necessary to sanitise the sector, minimise job losses, and protect deposits of 1,147,366) Ghanaians and their businesses and the people they employed.

The banking sector has emerged stronger from these developments, and inspired confidence in it.

Source: GNA