Bpifrance wants to boost business creation in priority neighborhoods

Bpifrance is launching a new business creation plan in priority areas of city policy. The public investment bank will this time release nearly 500 million euros.

This program succeeds another program, “Entrepreneurship for All”, which mobilized 135 million euros between 2019 and 2023. This resulted in the creation of 32,000 companies, mainly very small structures of the individual entrepreneurship type, microenterprises still operational.

This financial support responds to a real demand. According to Bpifrance, the proportion of residents from QPVs (priority neighborhoods of the city, thus designated by the government) intending to create a business and carrying out a real project, increased from 15 to 26% over the last five to last six years.

Detect and support projects

Bpifrance indicated, Thursday April 25, that it was putting exactly 456 million euros on the table. The envelope will be used to detect, inform and guide candidates for business creation. But most of it will be used to financially support reliable projects whose economic model appears solid. Bpifrance makes a point of not unnecessarily supporting projects doomed to failure because they are poorly put together. It is precisely its role to detect them upstream and to explain why to budding entrepreneurs, although they are always full of good will.

The beneficiaries of public aid for business creation in these neighborhoods are 49% women and 16% are under 25 years old. A figure may be surprising, but it proves that these selected cities are also full of potential talent. Some 60% of young people identified and presenting viable projects have a Baccalaureate degree or more. This new program deployed by Bpifrance is based on a target of 500,000 people detected in all 1,300 priority neighborhoods of the city’s policy. As for the main sectors for business creation, these are retail trade, transport and construction (Building and public works).