KUALA LUMPUR: The government has outlined five strategies to enhance Bumiputera Economic Community (BEC) opportunities to increase wealth ownership in the Eleventh Malaysia Plan (11MP), including to empower Bumiputera human capital and enlarge Bumiputera wealth ownership share.
In order to address the issues and challenges faced by the Bumiputera community, more creative and innovative efforts would be undertaken, said the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) of the Prime Minister’s Department in the 11MP.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak tabled the five-year (2016-2020) plan in the Dewan Rakyat today.
Under the first strategy — empowering Bumiputera human capital, high-skills training and certified professional programmes such as the Skills Steering Programme under the Bumiputera Education Steering Foundation would be expanded to improve skills of the Bumiputeras.
“By 2020, the participation of Bumiputeras in skilled occupation categories is targeted to reach at least 60 per cent,” said the EPU.
The second strategy is to increase Bumiputera effective control and sustainable corporate ownership by broadening investment strategy to improve equity ownership.
This would also be through increasing government-linked companies and government-linked investment companies’ divestment of non-core assets and activities to Bumiputera enterpreneurs as well as introducing new funding
mechanisms for financial assets.
The third strategy is to enlarge the share of Bumiputera wealth ownership by strengthening institutional-based programmes for assets ownership and introducing new funding mechanisms for non-financial assets.
The fourth strategy is to empower the BEC by reducing financing to low value-added and non-strategic industries, intensifying entrepreneur financing programmes, as well as, establishing platform for business collaboration and
marketing opportunities, among others.
The last strategy is to strengthen delivery effectiveness of Bumiputera-oriented programmes via setting up an integrated database comprising Bumiputera socio-economic status and simplifying government procedures to reduce
the cost of doing business. -Bernama