I just wrote a few weeks ago about the immense challenges that Saudi entrepreneurs have in obtaining loans to help them start and run their small to medium enterprises, citing the shocking figure of 212,000 SMEs that had closed down in the past two years. New data just released in a Bloomberg News article brings more bad news, as if that was possible.

According to the article entitled “Startups in Saudi Arabia get cold shoulder from banks,” the amount of money lent to SMEs fell 76 percent last year to SR572 million as banks tightened their belts, says data from the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, which runs the SME Loan Guarantee Program. In comparison, the article points out, total bank credit in the Kingdom rose 12 percent in 2014 to SR1.25 trillion.

What is most shocking comes later in the article: Guess how many loans to SMEs were given by two very prominent banks operating in the Kingdom last year? A measly two loans each!

No wonder so many SMEs have been closing shop over the past two years. This drying up of credit is causing a retraction in Saudi-owned businesses and will discourage young Saudis with an entrepreneurial spirit from opening their own companies in the future when they run into the fact that they cannot secure financing through any of the local banks.

This is a depressing and alarming situation that Saudi banks in general should look into seriously. After all, year after year, we see them making record profits, and even so they do not see fit to plough back more of that money into the community where they made their profits? They impose quasi-impossible conditions for new companies to fulfill, such as having audited financial statements for the past year to show them before they will approve a loan, which is logically impossible because if you had enough money in your company’s bank account to show a healthy history of movements for one year you probably would not be needing a loan to begin with!

A friend in Jeddah wrote to me after reading my previous column to tell me of a young Saudi entrepreneur who owns a hamburger van on the Corniche. According to her, he has been unable to hire enough foreign workers to run the business during the week because of the restrictions on visas imposed by the Saudization program. With that impediment, the young man is personally running the van only on Fridays, cooking and serving the hamburgers to customers himself.

I do think that more young Saudis, like the one mentioned above, need to be prepared to do more of the grunt work themselves, and become less dependent on cheap, foreign labor. Cooking, cleaning tables and stocking shelves in a shop may not be glamorous but they are necessary daily tasks within successful businesses. We Saudis cannot believe that we will have access to foreign workers forever, and should become more self-sufficient in the labor market. For sure not all Saudis are going to go to university and become managers, so there should be enough Saudis to fill the less challenging jobs.

• The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.