Saudi Arabia grants $2.4bn to help small businesses amid Covid-19 crisis

Saudi Arabia’s Social Development Bank has introduced new initiatives to support small businesses and self-employed entrepreneurs hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The bank announced an overall package of 9 billion riyals ($2.4bn), according to Saudi Arabia’s state news agency (SPA) – 8bn riyals of which ($2.1bn) will be used to help 6,000 businesses with financing and a newly created portfolio will focus on companies in the health-care sector.

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As well as the funding, the back has offered a six-month grace period to repay instalments, starting from the beginning of April, 2020.

A statement of SPA said:

“The umbrella of the initiatives included elastic and easier funding channels for the productive families and small self-employed entrepreneurs, through the mediators of micro funding, for six-months, starting from last April, too.”

The bank has also created a Portfolio for Health Care, to fund around 1,000 medical units through raising their operational capacity.

It was announced on Friday that there are 24,097 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the kingdom, of which, 20,373 are active cases where the condition of patients is described as “mostly stable”.

There were 392 recoveries, taking the total to 3,555, although seven new deaths took the death toll to 169.