The theme for the February 7th  Freetown Pitch Night was “Catalyst for Growth- BDS ”.

SME businesses have clearly grown in the last decade in West Africa and in Sierra Leone. Their development has often required external inputs from key government initiatives or NGO programs or other non-profits.

Increasingly there has a paradigm shift in private companies filling that gap with specific services for SMEs As the SME market is getting much more clearly defined by size, business cycle, sector, ICT capacity, etc…

From feasibility studies to development of business plans, business support services help prospective and existing businesses streamline their process and promote a far more efficient turnaround of their investments and function as a catalyst to their growth and success.

Within Sierra Leone there are nonetheless challenges in providing BDS services, from low data availability and costs of getting actionable data, to enabling environment of trust and the web entanglement of compliance and regulation for many opaque facets of business; we nonetheless have four businesses today that are taking up those challenges with their investment in BDS businesses.