By ANDELY-BEEVE Jr. Founder and CEO of Le Mentor SME Ratings, an agency for economic intelligence and SME rating in the Republic of Congo.
In Congo-Brazzaville, SMEs drive the economy but remain invisible to those who should finance them. There are officially more than eleven thousand very small and medium-sized enterprises in the country, in addition to an artisanal sector that officially employs 300,000 people and probably two to three times more in the informal sector. They employ, they produce, they circulate value in local economies that have never been sustainably irrigated by oil revenues alone.
And yet, formal financing is almost inaccessible to them. The average cost of loans to SMEs often exceeds 14% per year according to data from the Central African States Bank (BEAC), while the net margin of micro-enterprises remains below 10%. Banks offer financing at a rate that structurally cannot be absorbed by the companies. It is not a problem of bank liquidity. It is a problem of readability. Funders do not really know who these companies are. And in the face of uncertainty, they protect themselves by refusing. It is this gap that needs to be named. It is this gap that needs to be filled.
Formalization is not enough
The first reflex of public policies towards SME financing has long been the same: formalize. Register. Ensure compliance. The idea is appealing in its simplicity – an SME with a RCCM number, a tax identifier, and a bank account would be an SME accessible to credit.
This is a diagnostic error
Congolese law No. 46-2014 of November 3, 2014 defines an SME as any company employing between 10 and 100 employees and generating annual turnover between 25 million and 2 billion CFA francs. This legal definition says that a company exists. It does not say if this company is trustworthy. It says nothing about how it honors its supplier commitments, its regularity over time, or its actual ability to repay a loan. The one-stop shop has simplified business creation – it is a real progress. But it has not solved the fundamental problem: registration produces companies visible to the administration. It does not produce companies readable to funders.
Asking an SME to be formalized to be credible is to confuse address with character. One says where it is. The other says what it is worth.
The sustainable responsibility of a company has no size
There is a persistent misconception: sustainability would be a concern of large companies. Responsible governance, respect for contractual commitments, social and fiscal regularity – all of this would be the privilege of those who already have the means to address it.
This is false in fact and dangerous in its consequences.
An SME that pays its suppliers on time, properly declares its employees, honors its tax obligations – this SME is already practicing a demanding form of economic responsibility. It generates predictable, traceable flows that reassure partners far beyond what any carefully presented credit file can do.
Sustainable responsibility has no size. It has a discipline. And this discipline is precisely what credibility rating seeks to observe, weigh, and value.
The reign of subjectivity
In this analytical void, a parallel system has discreetly settled, powerful, and deeply unequal. That of subjective trust. In Congo as in much of the continent, access to SME financing is based on three unofficial criteria: the network, oral reputation, and personal relationship with a bank decision-maker. In the absence of reliable information, funders do what any human does in the face of uncertainty: they trust what they know.
According to the World Bank, over 80% of formal SMEs in sub-Saharan Africa have unmet financing needs. In the CEMAC zone, regulatory constraints push banks to concentrate their capacity on a few large counterparts, to the explicit detriment of SMEs considered too risky. The best-funded SMEs are not the most performing, but they are the most known. Those whose manager frequents the right circle, who impress during a credit committee meeting.
The others, often younger, led by women, located outside Brazzaville or Pointe-Noire, remain in the shadows. Not because they are risky. Because no reliable signal allows them to be evaluated. It is not a risk asymmetry. It is an information asymmetry. These two things do not have the same solution.
Credibility is a data, not a feeling
The thesis defended here is simple in principle, demanding in execution: the credibility of a Congolese SME can be observed, broken down, weighed, and translated into a readable score. The credibility of a company is manifested in concrete signals: how it pays its suppliers, how it manages its deadlines, how it behaves towards its tax obligations, how its manager handles crises. Each of these signals, taken individually, is anecdotal. Aggregated and weighed according to a rigorous methodology, they produce a faithful image of what an SME really is, not what it claims to be in a credit file, but what it is in the ordinary course of its activity.
Comparable models already exist for states and large companies. Their logic is simple: reduce uncertainty by producing a readable signal from complex information. This logic is still largely absent from the financing of African SMEs. Not because it is impossible, but because no one has yet seriously tackled it, with the tools and on-the-ground proximity that this context demands.
What it changes for financing actors
For Congolese banks, an external and auditable score reduces the cost of risk analysis and objectifies the credit decision. This is good for the bank and for the SME that no longer has to indefinitely wait for a decision motivated by intuition alone. For the FIGA and public guarantee schemes, it is a much more robust targeting tool than self-declaration, directing resources towards SMEs that will make the best use of them.
For multilateral donors supporting the national SME strategy, external rating finally gives measurable backbone to ambitions too often merely declarative. For SMEs themselves, having an independent rating means acquiring something rare: proof. A common language that funders understand and can respond to.
Time for action
Congo-Brazzaville cannot afford to continue financing or refusing to finance its SMEs based on financiers’ instincts. With a poverty rate of 46.5% and a structural oil dependence, diversifying the real economy is not an option. It is a necessity. And this diversification will not happen without SMEs, SMEs will not develop without financing, and financing will not come without a reliable evaluation system. The chain has been known for years. What is lacking today is not a diagnosis. It is a decision.
To banks, integrate external rating into your processing procedures. To guarantee institutions and donors, demand it as an eligibility criterion. To SMEs, invest in your evaluation as you invest in your production. This is your most undervalued capital. Credibility is not a feeling granted according to the mood of a credit committee. It is an operational reality, observable and measurable. It is time from Brazzaville to treat it as such.
ANDELY-BEEVE Jr. is the founder and CEO of Le Mentor SME Ratings, an agency for economic intelligence and SME rating in the Republic of Congo.
