When the economy squeezes, who pays the bill?
A working session with business owners in the FCT — convened with the Centre for Inclusive Social Development. Not a panel about SMEs. A room of the people living it.
Register NowSeats in the room are limited. Online places are also available.
Everything went up.
Except customers.
Ask any operator in the FCT what the last twelve months cost them and the answer arrives as a list, not a sentence. Loan interest up. Raw materials up. Levies and fees up. Diesel up. Customers down.
Each of those lines is set somewhere else — by a monetary policy decision, a tariff schedule, a levy introduced mid-year, a power supply that did not arrive. None of them are set by the business that pays them. The bill still lands on the same desk.
That is the subject of this roundtable. Not whether SMEs are struggling, which is settled, but where the cost is being transferred from, and who decided it. Policy is made on the assumption that firms can absorb it. This session tests that assumption against the people holding the receipts.
Who should
be there
Bring the receipts. Literally.
01 Business owners and operators in the FCT
Any size, any sector, formal or informal. If you set prices, make payroll, or decide whether to restock this month, the room is for you.
02 People who carry the compliance burden
Those who deal with the levies, permits, renewals and inspections — the costs that rarely appear in a headline figure but decide whether a margin survives.
03 Anyone whose numbers contradict the official story
Evidence is the point. A record of what changed and what it cost is more useful to this conversation than an opinion about the economy.
Convened by
practitioners
Switch Advisory works on the other side of this problem — with the state governments and development partners who design the reforms businesses then live under. Business development for SMEs is one of our six practice areas. See the practice
That vantage point is only worth something if the evidence running into it is real. Convening operators directly, with the Centre for Inclusive Social Development, is how that evidence gets collected rather than assumed.