216,089 Individual Microentrepreneurs (MEIs), microenterprises and small businesses in Alagoas will be able to benefit from the Believe Program, launched this Monday (22) by the Federal Government. The state is the 3rd in the Northeast with the fewest indebted companies able to negotiate. Bahia is the northeastern state with the most companies, 1,190,515.
Across the country, there are more than 15.6 million MEIs, of which 152 thousand are registered in Alagoas. Of this universe in Alagoas, 83.5 thousand are led by men (55%) and 68.5 thousand (45%) by women.
The state also demonstrates potential in the microenterprise sector, with 52,600 units of this type of business among the more than 6.69 million registered in Brazil.
Finally, the small business sector in Alagoas currently has 11,368 registrations among more than 1.21 million across the country that could expand access to credit through Crédito.
Among the goals of the initiative are creating conditions to expand access to credit, renegotiate debts and guarantee more support for these three sectors of the economy. “There is nothing more essential for a society, whatever it may be, to develop, if it is unable to have opportunities and if it does not have credit. We are creating the conditions so that, regardless of quantity, social origin, size of business, people have the right to access the financial system and take out credit”, stated the President of the Republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, during the program launch event, at Palácio do Planalto.
In Axis 1, the microcredit program for those enrolled in CadÚnico targets low-income families enrolled in the Cadastro Único; informal ones; women (since, currently, 84% of Bolsa Família families are headed by women); small rural producers who access the Food Acquisition Program (PAA); and support for the Rural Development program.
The microcredit program is a credit guarantee system, carried out through FGO-Desenrola, which will have a source of R$500 million in resources for investments in 2024. FGO-Desenrola is a guarantee instrument intended for financial institutions that operate with credit to settle debts of Desenrola Brasil Track 1 beneficiaries. An important guideline of the microcredit program is that at least half of the grants must be allocated to women.
The Single Registry currently has around 95 million people. Between January 2018 and June 2022, only one million families registered with CadÚnico had access to productive microcredit. During this period, 5.6 million operations were carried out, totaling R$32.5 billion in transactions, with an average value of R$5.74 thousand. The default rate among people on the annual CadÚnico is less than 1.7%.
In Axis 2, one of the main actions is Desenrola Pequenos Negócios. Its target audience is MEIs, micro-enterprises and small companies with annual gross revenue of up to R$4.8 million and which are in default on bank debts.
According to Serasa Experian, around 6.3 million micro and small companies were in default in January 2024, the highest number in the series started in 2016. To try to reverse this situation, the Federal Government will authorize the renegotiated value until the end of 2024 of defaulted debts up to the day of publication of the MP can be counted for calculating banks’ presumed credit in the years 2025 to 2029. This means that banks will be able to increase their level of capital to grant loans.
This incentive does not generate any expenses for the Government in 2024. In the coming years, the estimated cost of tax waivers is very low, in the order of R$18 million in 2025, only R$3 million in 2026, and at no cost to the government in 2027.
