Luciana Vasconcelos
Reporter - Agência Brasil

Brasília - Providing incentives for loans to black businessmen was one of the ideas that received backing at the seminar on the Incubation of Afro-Brazilian Entrepreneurs, held at the end of January in Brasília. One of the policies that were suggested calls for a program of financial credit to black businessmen, to be developed jointly by the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Seppir), the National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES), the Bank of Brazil, and the National Association of Groups of Afro-Brazilian Businessmen and Entrepreneurs (Anceabra).

For the undersecretary of the Seppir, João Nogueira, Afro-descendants have suffered a historical dearth of entrepreneurial culture. He assures that the government wants to encourage and strengthen this type of activity. "We know that 45% of the country's population is black and only 2 or 3% of entrepreneurs are black, which is next to nothing," he affirms.

Nogueira says that access to checking accounts and credit is much lower among blacks. According to him, this segment of the population, besides being excluded from opportunities to obtain salaried jobs in a way different from the white population, also faces greater difficulties when it comes to credit. "They go after it less, in large part because they suffered a lot of discrimination when they tried to get it," he comments.

Translation: David Silberstein