More than 738,000€ of the Recovery Plan have reached the SMEs of Melilla through Kit Digital

Alberto Martínez Lacambra, General Director of Red.es, - an entity attached to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation through the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence -, the Government delegate in the City of Melilla, Sabrina Moh Abdelkader and Gloria Rojas Ruiz, First Vice-President of the Autonomous City of Melilla have inaugurated and closed today in Melilla the Digital Kit Dialogue meeting. This aid program of the Government of Spain, managed by Red.es, aims to promote the digitization of small, micro-enterprises and self-employed, and thus contribute to modernizing the Spanish productive fabric.

Melilla is one of the chosen destinations of the informative meetings tour that Red.es began in 2022 and covers all of Spain. The objective is to know the opportunities for digitization, and to explain to small companies, micro-companies and self-employed professionals how they can access this aid, what advantages the digitization of their companies has and what facilitating role the digitizing agents and other collaborating entities play in this process. In the coming months the tour will continue with stops in different places in Spain.

Extended deadline to apply for assistance until December 2024
The deadline to request the help of Kit Digital will be open until December 2024 with grants of € 12,000, € 6,000 and € 2,000 depending on the number of employees that the company or the self-employed has.

In the Autonomous City of Melilla, around 150 Digital Kit grants have already been granted to small businesses, micro-enterprises and self-employed people, which means that more than 738,000 euros from European Next Generation EU funds have reached SMEs in the province to implement basic digitization solutions.
In her speech, the delegate of the Government in the City of Melilla, Sabrina Moh Abdelkader, referred to the need to modernize and digitize the industrial fabric of the city, with special attention to SMEs and the self-employed.

In this regard, it has valued the Kit Digital program as a tool to subsidize the implementation of maximum digital solutions when it comes to grants of up to 12,000 euros that will help companies and self-employed people in Melilla to improve and enhance their businesses, “and become the economic and business sector that the Melilla of the 21st century needs”.

On the other hand, Gloria Rojas Ruiz, first vice-president of the Autonomous City of Melilla has pointed out that, also, from the Autonomous City of Melilla with the help of the Ministry through this type of aid, they have been able to offer actions to improve digital connectivity in the city, training in digital skills from the most basic levels to the top, as well as the implementation of technology-based companies and the creation of Melilla startups. Therefore, we must highlight the importance of the Digital Kit and the joint effort of the local and central government in this commitment to technology and digitalization.

Alberto Martínez Lacambra, CEO of Red.es, said that “at the moment 340,000 companies have requested the aid and we have delivered 185,000 digital bonds to date, which means that close to 950 million euros have reached Spanish SMEs”. He recalled that the deadline for applying for aid has been extended until December 2024, but insisted that it is non-competitive concurrence aid for what is granted on a first-come, first-served basis, and encouraged all SMEs to apply. He also commented that the aid “is a boost for the ICT sector, of the 10,400 agents adhered, 66% have already signed agreements”.

The Corporate Deputy Director of Red.es, Antonio Saravia, was in charge of explaining the Digital Kit program in depth, as well as the detail of the application procedures for grants and the adhesion of digitizing agents.

Agile and simple program for SMEs and freelancers
Kit Digital is an innovative program, among other aspects, for its agility in the processing of grants. Under the motto of ‘zero papers’ and thanks to robotization tools, it has been possible to speed up the process so that it has been possible to reduce the processing time of a dossier from three hours on average to three minutes. This agility allows that, if a request is correct, it is granted within 15 days.

In fact, currently, 100% of the companies that met the requirements and correctly submitted the application are receiving their digital voucher.

Another of the innovations of the Program is the figure of the “voluntary representative” that allows any third party, be it a natural or legal person, duly authorized, to request the subsidy on behalf of the company eliminating procedures to the SME and the self-employed.

The figure of the ‘digitizing agent’
Kit Digital wanted to give a leading role to ICT SMEs to ensure that digitization is maintained over time and improves the productivity of beneficiaries and digitizing agents. In fact, at the moment there are about 10,200 agents registered, of which 98% are small ICT companies.

Entities interested in being a ‘digitizing agent’ can continue to apply for membership for the entire duration of the Program at the electronic headquarters of Red.es (sede.red.gob.es).

The digitizing agents are the only ones empowered to sign the ‘digitization solution provision agreements’ with the companies benefiting from the Digital Kit program and digital voucher holders.

In this way, they will be able to accompany them in their digital transformation processes and provide the digitalization solutions that allow them to advance in their level of digital maturity, in key areas of business digitalization such as: presence on the Internet, with the creation of a website or the management of social networks; electronic commerce; customer management; the virtual office; business intelligence and analytics; the automation of processes such as accounting, billing or inventory; electronic invoicing; secure communications; cybersecurity, advanced presence on the Internet and marketplace.

In the Autonomous City of Melilla, for the moment, the most demanding solutions are those of website, social media management and virtual office tools.

In order to make it easier for SMEs and self-employed professionals to access support, the participating digitizing agents will be able to collaborate in the application tasks. In addition, the digitizing agents will be those who present all the supporting documentation and those who receive the payment of the digital voucher given by the beneficiary, once their justification has been accepted, the payment term being less than 60 days, if the justification is done correctly.

The Digital Kit program
Kit Digital is endowed with a budget of 3,067 million euros, financed by the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan of Spain Next Generation EU within the framework of the Spain Digital 2026 agenda and the Digitalization Plan of SMEs 2021-2025, which aims to digitize SMEs and self-employed throughout the national territory of all productive sectors throughout the national territory.

Interested companies can access all the information on the web www.acelerapyme.es and on the telephone 900 909 001, and also receive advice in person in the offices Acelera SMEs distributed throughout the Spanish geography.