Empowering women: ‘Cheap start-up loans will cut poverty’

The finance minister said the loans would help women and youths start small business and cottage industries.

LAHORE:

Empowering women and youths to start their own businesses would bring down both poverty and unemployment, and this is what the Punjab government is trying to do by offering cheap loans, said Finance Minister Mian Mujtaba Shujaur Rehman on Saturday.

Addressing a reception here at Javed Park, the minister said that the loans would help women and youths start small business and cottage industries. Rehman said that the chief minister was determined to improve public healthcare and so the Health Department budget had been raised and Rs7.5 billion had been allocated for free treatment and medicine at government hospitals.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 6^th, 2013.