A recent conference saw government, political and institutional organisations, entrepreneurs and industrial SME owners discuss challenges, solutions and action plans for facilitating access to government and semi-government projects’ procurement. Enterprise Qatar, a SME incubation and support centre, organised the workshop, which was held under the patronage of HE Sheikh Jassim bin Abdulaziz bin Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, Minister of Business and Commerce, and paved the way for the upcoming Government Procurement Conference set to take place in February 2013. Noora al-Mannai, CEO of Enterprise Qatar, told the press that a key obstacle facing new SMEs is funding. “In the West you have angel investments and venture capitalists, which today do not exist in Qatar. We are working on introducing those kinds of products to the market in order to raise awareness, so later on private investors can be interested after they see successful stories,” said al-Mannai. Al-Mannai said that another challenge facing SMEs is reducing the gap between demand and supply, saying that the workshop is a demonstration of how people in business think that the government is not supporting this agenda. “The government is working to achieve certain objectives and milestones, they can’t just wait for the smaller and medium enterprises to adhere to them. We need to reduce this and give SMEs the desired weight in the economy,” she said.She also said that in the Middle East in general there is a lack of incubation centres that help SMEs to identify whether their ideas are commercially viable or not, or whether the entrepreneurs actually have the ability to build these businesses. She said that Enterprise Qatar is trying to provide this incubation space. Al-Mannai said that while it was not on the workshop’s agenda, supporting SMEs with subsidies and price protection will in the future be addressed by the various relevant parties, and “we will facilitate putting these people in touch with certain parties to help them with subsidising their projects.” She said that Enterprise Qatar has started a study into the SME market in Qatar covering different sectors which also aims to make projections for these sectors. The findings of the study will ultimately determine what kind of support is provided. She is optimistic that Qatar can quickly develop the necessary business and entrepreneurial culture “as people learn fast, so we have very young bright people, Qataris and non-Qataris, who are in love with this economy and want to be part of the growth of the economy, and the SMEs who are very interested to be part of the growth. So the challenge is how we can create this homogeneous partnership.”Al-Mannai added: “Through our partnerships with all other interested government and non-government entities, we will be implementing the reform initiatives that have come out of this think-tank to help prospective and existing SMEs to understand the basics about government procurement and the contracting market place. A pool of EQ experts will be following-up this initiative for an entire year and another major conference will be held during the first half of 2013, in order to engage further collaboration of additional related entities with the objective to improve the programme across its different phases.”