BUSINESS

Successful 2021 - terabank Summarizes Small and Medium Business

Small and medium business is a strategic segment of terabank and its promotion is one of the most important priorities. That is why the bank is constantly offering new products and various supporting initiatives to small and medium businesses.

A few days ago, the bank released the successful performance fi gures for its SME portfolio for 2021 as well as its supporting projects and results. Konstantine Makatsaria, Head of terabank's Micro, Small and Medium Business Management Department, talks about them in detail now.

AS MENTIONED IN THE PUBLISHED RESULTS, TERABANK HAS SHOWN A POSITIVE GROWTH IN THE FIELD OF SMALL AND MEDIUM BUSINESSES. WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE SPECIFIC INDICATORS?

First of all, I should mention that last year showed tangible results for us in terms of small and medium-sized businesses. The fi nancing rate for the segment increased: the loan and deposit portfolio - by 17% and the number of borrowers - by 26%.

Speaking about the results, it is especially noteworthy that terabank's loan portfolio expanded in terms of public funding programs last year. I mean, the Produce in Georgia program of the Rural Development Agency. For example, within the framework of the Agency's Produce in Georgia initiatives, we fi nanced 50 businesses in various fi elds, including representatives of local production and the tourism industry. Up to 10% of the total number of loans issued by the Agency comes from terabank which is a very good result.

As I have already mentioned, we worked intensively on agro loans, thus being actively involved in the development of agriculture. The total loan portfolio issued to the agricultural sector is 78 million GEL.

WHAT MADE 2021 STAND OUT IN TERMS OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES OFFERED TO BUSINESS CUSTOMERS?

Last year, we offered our business customers important news in this regard as well. For example, I can name the support for the digitization of small and medium business activities which we focused on. It is this support that has made it possible for them to offer an electronic payment system as a separate product.

In addition, we have launched a universal cash in & out ATM for business clients which allows you to deposit and withdraw large amounts of money at any time.

BANK SUPPORT FOR BUSINESSES IS OF PARTICULAR IMPORTANCE, ESPECIALLY DURING A PANDEMIC. SUCH SUPPORTING INITIATIVES HAVE BEEN A MAJOR PART OF TERABANK'S CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN RECENT YEARS. HOW WOULD YOU ASSESS 2021 IN THIS REGARD?

Last year, we made one of the main focuses on sharing information and knowledge. To this end, we held information meetings and introduced our products and services to business customers who operate in different regions of the country. It should be noted that a signifi cant part of these meetings was dedicated to the detailed presentation of the initiatives of the Rural Development Agency’s Produce in Georgia program, fi nancing opportunities and preferential business loans.

At the same time, we highlighted the importance of sharing knowledge with business customers. We conducted webinars on various topics, including the perspective of agro-tourism in Georgia and tourism during the pandemic, business digitization, branding, information security, etc.

The year 2021 turned out to be especially important as terabank's business support direction gained special recognition. The terabank for Business Support project, in which we concentrate a signifi cant effort, won the Meliora Award in the responsible business competition of Georgia. We won one of the top categories - Support for Small Business and Affected Sectors During the COVID-19 Pandemic. A very important project which we implemented in 2020 was to provide a gift package of services tailored to the needs of 50 of terabank’s business customers. This brought real and tangible results to small and medium-sized businesses.

WHAT WILL BE THE MAIN POINTS YOU WILL FOCUS ON IN THE PROCESS OF SUPPORTING SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES THIS YEAR?

Support for small and medium-sized businesses will again be one of the priorities for terabank for 2022. The main emphasis will continue to be on the development of digital products and services, knowledge sharing and the promotion of business development.

UNDP Support Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders

The Women Entrepreneurs’ Program will draw on the resources made available by the Bank of Georgia, UNDP and the Government of Sweden. Photo by Leli Blagonravova/UNDP

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Bank of Georgia mid-February signed a Memorandum of Understanding to support the up-and-coming generation of women business leaders.

This unprecedented partnership is expected to create game-changing opportunities for over 200 women-led startups and growing companies across the country.

The Women Entrepreneurs’ School to be established under this collaboration offers proven business development models to help women identify their best prospects and build effective strategies to achieve their business goals. This unique approach, known as 360-Degree Business Development Support, creates a blueprint for new entrepreneurs, assisting them in four main areas: gaining theoretical knowledge, learning practical tools, accessing fi nancial resources, and building a strong cooperation network.

The Women Entrepreneurs’ School draws on the resources made available by the Bank of Georgia, the Government of Sweden and UNDP’s Rapid Financial Facility under the UN Joint Programme for Gender Equality.

Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, UNDP Assistant Administrator and Director of the Regional Bureau for Europe and Central Asia, joined the event online from the UNDP headquarters in New York to inaugurate the agreement.

“Closing the gender gap has become a business imperative. While the problem is complex and the solutions are many, the most critical step is to help women realise that their future is too important to delegate it to someone else. UNDP welcomes our growing cooperation with the private sector that empowers women to determine their careers and their place in society,” Spoljaric Egger said.

Nick Beresford, UNDP Resident Representative in Georgia, and Zurab Masurashvili, Bank of Georgia’s Deputy CEO, attended the event in Tbilisi.

“The Bank of Georgia moves forward to support women in business. The ‘Women Entrepreneurs’ School’ draws on our partnership with UNDP and on the assessment of women’s needs in entering business activities,” Masurashvili said. “Our joint work in this project will focus on four main directions that include education, support and coaching, practical experience and networking. We are convinced that this initiative will play an important role in empowering and supporting Georgian women entrepreneurs.”

“At UNDP, we believe that the empowerment of women makes the economy more sustainable, people wealthier and gender equality stronger. The Women Entrepreneurs’ School is expected to have a rising tide effect, inspire the establishment of successful business ventures and pave the path to greater social and economic prosperity,” Beresford said.

Even though women-led enterprises are one of the fast-growing segments in Georgia, the business sector is still dominated by men. Only 29% of enterprises registered in 2019 were led by women, while the number of women-led businesses decreased slightly between 2017 and 2019. The National Statistics Offi ce reports that 59.5% of Georgian women are outside the labor force. According to the World Bank, such a gender gap in the labor market costs Georgia around 11% of its Gross Domestic Product per capita. [Source: Women in Business, 2021. Economic Policy Research Center]

Through their Women Entrepreneurs’ School, UNDP and the Bank of Georgia are on a mission to address these complex issues, support women entrepreneurs in the early stages of their business ventures and partner with them in their life-changing work.

Closing the gender gap has become a business imperative. The problem is complex, the solutions many, but the most critical step is to help women realise their future is too important to delegate to someone else

CinéDOC-School Sharing Documentary Films with Georgia’s Children and Teens

INTERVIEW BY KATIE RUTH DAVIES

CinéDOC-School is bringing outstanding documentary fi lms for children and teenagers to different schools across Georgia. GEORGIA TODAY went to meet Ileana Stanculescu, project co-ordinator, to fi nd out more.

“We started to work on a pilot project in 2020, when, because of the pandemic, cultural events simply did not take place or moved to the virtual space,” Stanculescu tells us. “The pilot project consisted of organizing online fi lm screenings and discussions for pupils as part of our year-long CinéDOC-Young screenings. Children could not go out to cinemas anymore, because cinemas were closed or it was risky to have so many children in one space, so we had to reach children in a different way. The idea came in a rather natural way, and the pandemic pushed it to be realized.”

It was an idea they took to one of their top regional coordinators, Sopo Gogokhia, a teacher who is used to organizing mini festivals and fi lm screenings in the town of Chkhorotsku. Together with her and with the Coalition Education for All, the CineDOC team developed a pilot project, fi rst aimed at reaching pupils from Chkhorotsku and Tbilisi, then reaching out to more and more schools from the regions.

“It went so well that we began considering including more schools and involving more teachers,” Stanculescu notes. “But we had to fi nd a way of doing it so that teachers organized the screenings themselves, otherwise the project had no chance of growing.

In 2021, they published a Call for Teachers, those interested in screening and discussing documentary fi lms in class. They received applications from 67 schools from all across Georgia and immediately understood the potential of the project. Many of the teachers who applied are civic education teachers, others teach history or literature; even a teacher of mathematics applied.

“We re-built our website, so that teachers can have access to fi lms via a password-protected online video library. Our online platform for schools includes virtual cinemas, which can be accessed by children during online screenings. Once the pandemic is over and pupils are back in class, teachers have the possibility to simply stream the fi lms directly from our website,” she says.

WHAT IS THE CINEDOC SCHOOL MISSION, AND WHO IS SUPPORTING IT?

The mission of the project is to bring good, engaging, creative documentary fi lms to young audiences, while involving them in discussions on different topics of social interest. But the selected fi lms are not only reports about certain topics: they are cinematic fi lms that have strong stories, fi lms with protagonists that go through some hardship, or manage to achieve their goals.

Children can identify with the protagonists of the documentaries. While developing critical thinking, they will be also exposed to the lives and stories of children from all across the world: from Venezuela to Japan. Such documentaries have the potential to increase empathy, and to promote positive social interaction. Last but not least, watching beautifully shot and edited fi lms, as well as animated documentaries, positively impacts the social-emotional growth of pupils and understanding of the world around them.

We are very lucky that this project is supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, for which quality education and civic education are core priorities. From this spring, we will also again have the Creative Europe Program of the European Union as codonor.

As we organize training sessions for the selected teachers, we also invite guest speakers from other European countries. For example, guest speakers that represent the project One World in Schools, a documentary fi lm screenings project in the Czech Republic that reaches out to teachers and pupils from more than 3,900 primary and secondary schools there.

WHO CHOOSES THE FILMS AND WHICH FILMS ARE SHOWN?

Within our team, we choose and discuss the selection of fi lms from our large archive of documentaries that have been screened at our festival to date. But we have also started to add new titles. Our festival has had a competition for children called CinéDOC-Young, since its fi rst edition in 2013, meaning we can look back to some experience in programming fi lms for young audiences.

In addition, we invited the selected teachers to join online fi lm screenings and Q&A sessions with fi lmmakers during our 2021 edition. Many of the teachers were impressed by fi lms selected for the Focus Caucasus competition. We asked them to make a list of fi lms they would like to screen in class. After that, taking into account their preferences, we included their preferred fi lms in our selection too.

What is very important for us is that all the selected fi lms have an extraordinary visual style; that they are little pieces of cinematic art. Some fi lms are animated documentaries, suitable for younger children.

We are really glad to have been able to purchase screening rights to a series of short documentaries called “Kids on the Silk Road”. “Kids on the Silk Road” is 15 stories about children between the ages of 11 and 14, from 15 countries along the old silk route. Each story shows how the individual child deals with life’s challenges, big and small, which they face in their specifi c cultural and social contexts.

WHAT’S THE DURATION OF THE PROJECT?

We will implement this project at least until 2025, and we hope that we will be able to implement it later on too, especially if teachers are able to screen fi lms independently from us. Once the video library is established, with some fi lms purchased for a longer period of time, the teachers can easily continue to screen fi lms without our direct assistance.

CAN YOU GIVE US ONE OR TWO EXAMPLES OF SUCCESS STORIES WITHIN THIS PROJECT, OR HIGHLIGHTS, OR MOMENTS WHICH TOUCHED YOU?

There were innumerable moments during which we were really happy with the results, especially when the discussions with pupils lasted more than one hour, when you see that many of the teenagers and children were so glad to discuss, to share their opinions, to ask questions about the fi lms. Sometimes children have analyzed fi lms in better and deeper ways than any grown-ups could do. When the fi lm directors were present at the online discussions, they had so many questions and so many thoughts to share with them.

We also conducted a survey after a certain number of screenings, in order to receive some written feedback from participating pupils regarding the fi lms, the discussions, and overall format of the project. All of the surveyed pupils expressed their wish that this project continues; some of them have written us that they wanted to be able to watch such fi lms more often; others wrote us that they would like to also learn fi lmmaking and to work on short documentaries themselves.

WHAT ROLE DO THE SCHOOL TEACHERS PLAY IN THE PRE/ POST FILM SCREENING? WHAT HAS THE FEEDBACK BEEN LIKE AND HOW CAN SCHOOLS GET INVOLVED?

The role of teachers is essential, especially during the pre- and post-screening discussions. The teachers moderate the discussions with the pupils, they put the right accents, and they bring certain topics to their civic education, arts, literature or history classes that fi lms can highlight in a wonderful way.

But teachers are not only important during the discussions: they also advise us on which fi lms to select, which fi lms are suitable for which age groups and which fi lms we could add to our video library.

For example, teachers were impressed by an animated documentary from our archive. The fi lm deals with the destiny of Lithuanians who were deported to Siberia during Soviet times. The fi lm is told from the point of view of a granddaughter who discovers old letters and photos taken by her grandparents in Siberia. While the story is really sad, the fi lm is made in a light way, and it is almost like a cinematic fairytale.

If schools want to get involved, they can contact us anytime, by sending us an e-mail to: cinedocschool@gmail.com. Our colleague, Keti Tsirikidze, will be happy to answer all questions and to inform potentially interested teachers about this year’s new call for applications.

WHAT ARE THE PLANS AND GOALS FOR THE FUTURE?

We have many plans and ideas for the future. One of them is to establish cinema clubs at the participating schools. Some of the schools have already started with this activity. Cinema clubs could be like small, independent initiatives run by pupils and teachers. They could also apply for co-funding from local authorities and organize “Film Summer Camps”, for example. We will support them with fi lms and, if possible, also with documentary directing training sessions for children.

Another fun activity will be dubbing: we will invite pupils from different schools to a casting and select them to dub the newly added titles in Georgian, Armenian or Azeri, depending on the region of the participating schools. Dubbing fi lms is always very enjoyable and fun, and is also a fi lm literacy activity that increases the motivation of children to watch documentaries.

Last but not least, we plan to cooperate with organizations from Europe that are active in this fi eld, such as the Finnish Valve Film School for children. The plan is to organize common screenings and common discussions during which children from Georgia and children from Finland will discuss fi lms together, in online sessions. And, once the pandemic is over, we also hope to be able to visit, together with selected pupils and teachers from Georgia, the Oulu International Children’s and Youth Film Festival in Finland.