Access Bank has announced the partnership with the Office of the Vice President to commit N30 billion for four million Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), women and youth businesses in Nigeria.
This disclosure was made by the Group Managing Director of Access Bank, Mr Roosevelt Ogbonna, during an interview with journalists after a meeting with the Vice-President, Kashim Shettima at the Presidential Villa, on Friday in Abuja.
Details of the programme
The bank’s Group Managing Director disclosed that the N30 billion would be provided to the MSMEs at discounted rates between 15 to 17 per cent.
According to Ogbonna, the programme would benefit 700,000 to a million while overall four million deserving MSMEs, youths and some will be directly impacted.
He, however, noted that the Vice President directed that the programme should give special attention to businesses belonging to women.
- “Shettima has a bias for women as we do.
- ” It was a very interesting meeting with the Vice-President, Kashim Shettima, we spoke about how we can begin to impact the lives of women and youths in Nigeria as well as how we can support the MSMEs.
- ” We spoke on a broad range of issues. We want to change lives through the Office of the Vice-President of small businesses of women and youths.
- ” We do agree and determine that about 66 per cent of MSMEs in Nigeria are owned by women and youths. And I think one of the challenges that they faced was access to finance.
- ” Working with the Office of the vice-president we agreed today that Access Bank will provide about N30 billion towards supporting MSMEs and youths,” Ogbonna said.
The bank’s Group Managing Director also revealed that the youth who would benefit from the programme would undergo training to enable them to optimally make use of the loan, while MSMEs would be trained to ensure they find new markets for the products or services they come up with.
In his words,
- “This is not just about lending, we are building capacity by training the youths. We are ensuring that we can empower them through financing.
- ” We are also ensuring that we can find a new market for these MSMEs so that any product or service they come up with they can find an outlet for it.”
What Temitola said
On his part, Mr Temitola Adekunle-Johnson, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Job Creation and MSMEs, Office of the Vice-President, said the Federal Government was dedicated to partnering with the private sector to support SMEs.
He said:
- “President Bola Tinubu has told the entire world that Nigeria is ready and truly we are ready. Our doors are open for business and partnership.
- “And you cannot thrive in this economy without the private sector and nor can the private sector thrive alone with the public sector.
- “So for us, it is a partnership that has come at the right time. They have pledged their own N30 billion for the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) at discounted rates of between 15 to 17 per cent.
- ” This is a viable opportunity for MSMEs and it is not a programme that we will need to have another conference or a meeting for, it starts now.”
Even if there were only 1 million small businesses to be impacted, that’s just about 30k naira per business on the average, which is very insufficient. So, rather than target quantity, I think it would be more impfactful to scale down the number of participants drastically in order to achieve more quality results..
how do we access the loan?