BELTRAIDE Shares Its Plans for 2024

Leroy Almendarez

The Belize Trade and Investment Development Service is a statutory body of the Government of Belize that operates within the portfolio of the Ministry of Economic Development. Its purpose is to enable and facilitate innovative and competitive business development, particularly where micro, small and medium enterprise development is concerned. News Five asked BELTRAIDE’s Executive Director, Doctor Leroy Almendarez to share their plan for 2024 with us.

Dr. Leroy Almendarez, Executive Director, BELTRAIDE

“On February the 15th of this year, there’s the launch of a project that includes or incorporates or integrates the National Investment Policy, the MSME policy, and an export strategy, and again, it has to do with impact and how we’re going to be creating employment, the investment landscape in terms of trade and development, MSME development. So that’s one of the things – that’s on February 15th. They had a big ticket item for us as the National MSME Road Show. We had one two years ago, and so we do it every two years, and that is supposed to run from June to August. We plan to make it much bigger this year -as many communities or areas within the country that we can visit to promote, to grow, to stimulate the MSME growth within this country because of their contribution to employment and gross domestic product. And then later in the year we have our usual entrepreneurship convention. That’s where you bring all these entrepreneurs together, and especially now that we have segregated the economy into blue, green and orange. We expect to see far more involvement in terms of the – all those operating within the orange economy. And so it’s really – and of course, we’re looking of course as well as formalization those who can benefit from these incentives that exist. So we hope that, and we do plan to start to do a lot of marketing, so we hope that it will be much bigger than what it was even last year.”