Accion Microfinance Bank Limited is promoting financial inclusion in the country, as it last week empowered three physically challenged customers financially and socially.
The bank donated two power generating sets and financial support to these customers to boost their business and improve their living standard.
Taiwo Joda, managing director/CEO, who spoke at the bank’s annual customer forum in Lagos, said the bank is focused on empowering people and that their social impact aimed at giving back to the society where they operate.
He said part of the things the bank has done include reaching out to schools. “Our social impact is linked on the fact that we need to be able to give back to the society that we operate from”, Joda said.
“Micro finance bank is actually focus on empowering the people and so you can not totally dissociate yourself from the poor and we are trying to empower the poor, you also know there cannot be effective financial inclusion without social inclusion-if you do not give back to the society and you do not drive social sustainability you cannot be talking about financial sustainability,” he added.
The bank partnered with a lot of Schools in September 2018, where it gave out over 5,000 School bags and exercise books, notebooks to different Schools across the country to empower the indigene children.
“It is so exciting to the children who have never seen a school bag before and we are so excited about that idea.”
The annual customer’s forum, is an opportunity for the bank’s customers to come together to give the bank feedback on areas of its services to them.
Joda explained that it is an opportunity to appraise how well the bank is serving its customers, adding that it is a partnership that the bank has formed with its customers from the inception, in order to improve in much better way.
“Today we are celebrating three of our customers that are living with disabilities, but who are also economically active doing business and you could see the joy in them. They are not relying in family and friends to be able to feed themselves.
“We felt the least that we could do is to help their business grow and that is why for two of them- one who are into laundry business, and the second who is into sales of drinks, we gave them generators. While for the individual with visual impairment, we felt the way we can impact him is to pay the children school fees.
“When we interviewed them, we realized that the whole school fees have not been paid and the school session has to break, so what we did was to pay the back log of the outstanding school fees. We also paid for the new session and as time progresses; we will review what we can do to further improve the lives of the people.”
However, Joda admitted that the bank would be taking the initiative a step further because of the understanding that there is a lot of abilities in disability.
HOPE MOSES-ASHIKE
