Access Bank excites female SMEs across Africa with Womenpreneur Pitch-A-Ton second edition

As part of its promise to continuously provide financial and business skills to female entrepreneurs, Access Bank plc has unveiled the second edition of its Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton programme.

The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton Africa 2020 Campaign is designed to provide female-owned businesses across Africa an opportunity to access finance and world-class business training as well as mentoring opportunities. This programme has been designed to create an enabling environment for female entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.

Speaking at the launch of the second edition of this initiative, Ayona Trimnell, group head, W Initiative, said, “Access Bank has been a leading advocate for women’s economic empowerment in Nigeria and this is the key motivation for the ‘W’ Initiative, which caters to the women economy particularly in the areas of capacity building and creating networking opportunities for women.”

The Pitch-a-ton is an expansion of the Womenpreneur Business Workshop, under the Bank’s women proposition, the W Initiative, Trimnell stated, saying, “We launched the Pitch-a-ton initiative last year in line with our value proposition as the No. 1 Bank of Choice for women in Nigeria, and we got a tremendous amount of applications with innovative business ideas.

“This year, we want to do more and we want to reach out to more female entrepreneurs not just in Nigeria but across Africa. “As a responsible financial institution with huge presence in other African countries, we want to give the same opportunity to other female entrepreneurs in Ghana, Rwanda and Zambia as well as Sierra Leone, Gambia, & Congo to apply and participate in this year’s edition of the programme.

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The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton Africa 2020 will provide up to N9 million financial grants and a unique capacity building program aimed at empowering women entrepreneurs. The programme is designed as a three-month period incorporating pitching sessions and 8 weeks of mini-MBA training in collaboration with the IFC.

Interested persons from Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia and Rwanda as well as with extension to Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Congo who meet the criteria are required to fill an online application. The 500 candidates selected from this pool will then send in a sixty seconds video pitch, which will be screened by a credible panel of business experts to select 50 finalists.

As part of the graduation requirements, the 50 finalists will pitch their businesses, infusing learnings from the mini-MBA and will stand an opportunity to win financial grants up to N5 million.

As a leading commercial bank in Nigeria, Access Bank has made significant investments aimed at enhancing growth in the Small and Medium-size Enterprise sector. The Bank is also a major advocate for women in business through innovative offerings like the W Power Loan, a discounted financing at 15% interest per annum, for women to grow their business as well as other Business Support Services.

The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton is the first women-in-business support initiative of its kind in the industry. Please click HERE to know more.

Hope Moses-Ashike

Hope Moses-Ashike is an Associate Editor, Banking and Finance, with more than a decade of experience reporting on Nigeria’s financial system and broader economy. She closely tracks market movements, monetary policy decisions, company disclosures, regulatory actions, economic indicators, and global developments, and interprets what they mean for businesses, investors, policymakers, and households. Her reporting helps readers understand complex issues such as inflation trends, foreign exchange market dynamics, interest rate decisions, bank performance, and investment risks. She also covers major international events and periodically travels to Washington, D.C., to report on the World Bank/IMF Spring and Annual Meetings. Her dedication to financial journalism has earned her multiple recognitions and invitations to high-level professional development programmes. She is an alumna of the International Visitors Leadership Programme (IVLP) in the United States and holds an Advanced Financial Journalism Certificate from the Press Association Training in London, UK. Her other notable achievements include completing the Lagos Business School CMC Programme, the Bloomberg Media Africa Initiative Programme, and a Master Class in Journalism at Rhodes University in South Africa.