Khula is a development finance institution, which was established to ensure the availability of finance to SMEs, in areas where commercial financial institutions were wary to lend. During the briefing, Khula provided an overview of its mandate, the wholesale model it has been operating under, constraints and achievements of the current model, as well as the proposed implementation plan for KhulaDirect. The previous Committee had been appealing for the establishment of a retail model to address the bottlenecks of the wholesale model. This has come to fruition in the form of KhulaDirect. As the proposal for KhulaDirect has been approved by Cabinet on 3 December 2008, Khula is currently in the process of developing the implementation plan together with the DTI. Some of the reasons identified for the retail model were that: