How LAPO MFB enhances productivity through learning

It is not just earning a doctorate degree but acquiring same in microfinance. This entails that the microfinance sub-sector of the nation’s economy and even across border will stand to benefit a lot from Godwin Ehigiamusoe, managing director/chief executive of LAPO Microfinance Bank Limited, who recently earned a doctorate degree in microfinance.

Ehigiamusoe earned a PhD from Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State. His thesis with the topic – Policy Instruments and Financial Inclusion: A Comparative Study of the Ethiopian and Nigerian Microfinance Policy and Regulatory Frameworks, earned a distinction and is considered as relevant to the improvement of microfinance policy environment in Africa.

Analysts believe that the study is of great relevance to microfinance policy formulation. Creating an enabling policy environment for microfinance is critical to the achievement of financial inclusion goals, particularly in Africa, according to analysts. Regulatory authorities in Africa will find the highlights of the study useful.

Some note that Godwin Ehigiamusoe is one of the leading lights for microfinance in Africa. In the late 1980s, he founded LAPO (Lift Above Poverty Organisation), a successful pro-poor development organisation with microfinance operations in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

He had earlier earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology and Anthropology and Master’s degree in Development Studies from the University of Benin, Benin City, Edo State. He has attended several capacity enhancing courses at local and international institutions, including Harvard Kennedy School; Lagos Business School; IESE Business School, Barcelona, and INSEAD Business School (Singapore Campus).

Ehigiamusoe won the FATE Foundation’s Model Entrepreneur Award – Nigeria in 2008; the Schwab Foundation’s Outstanding Social Entrepreneur in Africa Award in 2010, and Lagos Business School’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014.

He has authored Understanding NGOs (1998); Poverty and Microfinance in Nigeria (2000); Issues in Microfinance: Enhancing Financial Inclusion (2011).

According to Ehigiamusoe, while responding to BusinessDay’s question, “my area of study in microfinance is linking policy instruments to liberalisation of access to financial services, which is also referred to as financial inclusion. The topic of my PhD thesis is ‘Policy Instruments and Financial Inclusion: A Comparative Study of the Nigerian and Ethiopian Microfinance Policy and Regulatory Frameworks.’ Ethiopia is the first nation in Africa to formulate microfinance policy in 1996. Nine years later, Nigeria launched her policy in 2005.”

 

HOPE MOSES-ASHIKE