VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

The Cooperative, Small and Medium-scale Enterprises Ministry has encouraged MSMEs to improve competitiveness to penetrate the global market and increase their contribution to Indonesia's export.

"This is one of our priorities to encourage micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to enter global market," the ministry's Deputy for SME Hanung Harimba Rachman said in a statement here on Sunday.

Rachman made the statement at the launching of 150 containers of MSME's soap export to six countries in Africa and the Middle East on Saturday (Jan 15, 2022).

The government, he continued, has targeted to increase the MSMEs' contribution to 17 percent to the total export by 2024, from currently 15.6 percent.

To reach the target, MSMEs would need to have cheaper logistical cost and faster administrative services for export.

According to Rachman, one main problem for the MSMEs is related to limited availability of containers that makes the transportation cost jump by 300 percent, while the risk of product damage has also increased due to the long period of storage.

Another problem is the absence of market intelligence that makes the MSMEs hard to map product potential and capacity, get international certificate and export funding for them.

"The contribution of our MSMEs to Indonesia's export is still lagging behind China's MSMEs that have 68 percent of contribution and logistic performance index of 3.61 (in the scale of 1-5), and India with 40 percent of contribution and logistic performance index 3.18," he said.

The ministry has developed some programs to establish a conducive export environment for MSMEs, including the establishment of SMESCO eastern hub for MSME products from the eastern regions of Indonesia.

It also established the SMESCO Labo to improve MSME's capability. (Antaranews)