Indonesia – DBS Foundation, an endeavour from DBS Bank to make a great impact in addressing Asia’s evolving social needs, has launched a new grant programme to support SMEs looking to kickstart their transition towards becoming more sustainable businesses.
This new programme is an extension of the DBS Foundation’s ongoing support for social enterprises (SEs), as it endeavours to foster the growth of businesses-for-impact, which is defined as businesses with dual bottom lines of profit and impact, regardless of their stage of growth.
The new grant programme is in search of SMEs, which are incorporated in Indonesia, as well as in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and India, with innovative sustainability solutions. Their proposals should address at least one of the following areas, namely reducing energy consumption, reducing waste, or sustainable supply chains.
The grant awardees will be receiving a grant amount of up to IDR1,051,405,196, a structured mentorship and advisory support, where DBS Foundation and the DBS SME Banking team will work with each SME awardee to map out key milestones and impact outcomes across a two-year horizon, and support from broader DBS franchise to help promising grant awardees to scale their businesses, including a range of working capital, supply chain financing, and digital transformation solutions.
Joyce Tee, the group head of SME banking at DBS and the board member of DBS Foundation, shared that while their engagement with SME owners has revealed their keen interest in adopting more sustainable business models, they are often caught up with operational matters and may lack the bandwidth or resources to begin.
“This is a gap that the DBS Foundation aims to fill with the new SME Grant Programme, which will help SMEs take their first step towards transforming into businesses for impact. Beyond grant funding, DBS will also avail our suite of sustainable financing solutions, ecosystem platforms and advisory services to help the most promising SME awardees accelerate their transformation efforts,” said Tee.
