Recently, Ecobank Nigeria had a special free exhibition and networking workshop for female entrepreneurs as part of activities to commemorate 2022 International Women’s Day (IWD). The Executive Director, Commercial Banking, Carol Oyedeji, in this interview with Kayode Tokede highlights major challenges facing female entrepreneurs and what initiatives the bank is offering to drive aggressive female’s participation in entrepreneurs where it has branches in Africa.
What are the major challenges of SMEs in Africa?
Number one is access to finance and the reason is that most times, they do not know the structure of their business. Number two is access to the market as they do not know how to package their goods. The third one is capacity building by understanding their business very well and actually ensuring they sell them. Ecobank the pan African bank is out to help businesses with all of these.
How has Ecobank strengthened SMEs as regards the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)?
As you likely know, Ecobank is one of the largest African banks with operations in over 33 countries. Which other bank do you think has the capacity to support entrepreneurs as much as we do? With such experts and presence in Africa, we have been able to create that access.
Access can be down to referrals, creating visibility for our customers across the different market in Africa. Because we have a presence in different markets in Africa, we have been able to tell them how each market environments are and support them as much as possible. Those sorts of benefits are the things we have been able to bring to the table.
How is Ellevate by Ecobank Nigeria empowering women to enhance economic growth?
As you likely know, we launched our Ellevate proportion in May of 2021, and Ellevate is focused on women and organizations that produce goods for women, organizations that have dominated women in leadership, and organizations that have a large proportion of women.
So our focus is to support these organizations to grow and enhance economic growth. What we do is to provide financing benefits to them and to encourage them to create value in the economy.
In Ellevate, funding is one of those ways as well as non-funding. The non-financing can be through capacity development where we train women micro-entrepreneurs so that they can stand on their own and add value to society.
What has been the contribution of Ellevate […]
