I just came across a March 2012 publication on our website from the African Development Bank (perhaps we linked to this only recently?)...Bank Financing to Small and Medium Enterprises in East Africa: Findings of a Survey in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, by Pietro Calice, Victor Chando and Sofiane Sekloua. Good read...only 23 pages (main text), and lots of interesting findings. some 16 banks were interviewed, four in each country. Some of my main take-aways:
1. as always, the definition of SME varies widely - but it's interesting to note that most of the banks use loan size and turnover, not employee numbers.
2. while all the banks say SMEs are important, in almost all cases their SME units are not "at par" with either the retail/consumer banking or the commercial/business banking units. This is despite many of the banks having more than one third of their total lending exposure in SMEs.
3. not surprisingly, the banks consider information access the key problem in growing their SME business...
4. the banks are very dependent on physical branches and the "shoe leather" approach for business development. but they are automating risk management. however, both credit risk undewriting and portfolio management still is mostly manual..
5. unfortunately the discussion of collateral requirements didn't distinguish between movable and immovable collateral.
lots more detail within...see the link to read the whole report!
matt