Grant 2024, Minister Ibrahimaj reveals the maximum funding for Startups and the plan for monitoring the winning projects

Applications to benefit from the call with support measures “Grant 2024” will remain open until the end of March. For your startup to be fundable, it must fulfill these three key elements: be profitable, innovative, and provide a solution to a problem or missing service in the market.

Invited to “Wake Up”, the Minister for Entrepreneurship and Business Climate, Delina Ibrahimaj, has reconfirmed the maximum funding values ??for the three beneficiary categories of this call, the way the projects will be evaluated for the selection of winners, as well as the assistance that will be given in their monitoring and development.

“There are three main elements that will serve to evaluate business ideas. In the first place, the entity that applies must be profitable, which means that projects will not be supported by NGOs for social purposes. The second element is to find a certain problem in the market and to provide the solution; as well as the third element is that it must be innovative. They should not be traditional businesses, such as agritourism, hotels or travel agencies, but they should be businesses that bring an innovation”, says Minister Ibrahimaj.

This year’s call has a value of 300 million ALL and aims to support three development phases of the startup. The first category is the young men and women who have an idea, but who are not registered as a business, whose financing will be done up to a maximum of 1.5 million new ALL. In the second group are businesses that have been registered for at least a year, have submitted a pair of financial statements and have a developed prototype, and need financing to develop this product and bring it to market. This category is supported up to a maximum of 4.5 million ALL.

The third category is the most consolidated businesses that have developed their prototype, but need support to commercialize it, to increase production, or to internationalize it, a category that will receive funding of up to 9 million ALL.

The minister emphasizes that in this process, transparency and professionalism are essential. The application selection process will be conducted fairly and independently by experts from various fields.

“I will personally make sure that there is as much transparency as possible in this whole process. This is also the reason why we have made an open call to select the experts who will participate in the evaluation commissions. Part of this commission will be a national expert, an international expert, one from the academy, the head of the Startup Albania Agency due to his position, and there will also be an employee of the public administration. It will be an independent commission for the evaluation of all the applications made”, explains Ibrahimaj.

According to her, there will also be a complaint commission for those who are dissatisfied. The appeal commission will be independent from the first commission that made their assessment. All of these will be public and will appear on the website of the Startup Albania Agency and the Ministry for Entrepreneurship and Business Climate.

With the fund made available for this year, it is intended to support 55-80 subjects. If the quality of the applications is high, the minister adds that other opportunities for financial support from both the government and various donors will be reviewed. For each of the subjects that will be financed, there will also be a mentor who will follow them. Every new business needs support for administrative training, but also to refine its idea a little better.

“We are identifying a list of mentors, who are specialists in various fields who work abroad, as well as in the country, who will have weekly meetings with the winning businesses, in order to discuss the ideas, developments, bottlenecks or problems that the businesses will have, in order to give their experience. They will be typical mentors who will support them for the best possible development of their project”, Minister Ibrahimaj explains, among other things.

Further, she adds that work will also be done with those entities that are not winners, but that have a potential and may be winners in future calls. “All our energies will be focused on promotion. The more successful these businesses are, the more they will serve the business climate and doing business in the country”, says Ibrahimaj.