Women access over 60% of MSMEs development fund- CBN

The deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Aishah Ahmad, says more than 60 percent of the Micro Small and Medium Enterprises Development Fund (MSMEDF) have been accessed by women.

Ahmad said the apex bank had ascribed 60 percent of the N220 billion MSMEDF to women, and informed that more than 60 percent have so far been taken up by women.

Ahmad said this at the WIMBIZ International Women’s Day celebration (IWD) 2022, which was hosted simultaneously in three hybrid sites (Abuja, Lagos, and Port Harcourt), with the theme “Break the Bias.

The deputy governor, however, said that the business environment in Nigeria must be made more appealing to women fast-track and sustain economic growth. She assured that the CBN will continue to provide more support and funding for women-owned enterprises.

“We will continue to promote the existing initiatives we have.

“We have targeted many facilities that were created to provide resilience for households businesses that were impacted by COVID-19. “And we will continue to provide entrepreneurship development training, because it is important that women have the necessary skills, to manage their businesses, provide proper accounting, and to put their businesses in a shape where they would be more likely to attract capital.”

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“And that is all that we are doing, and we will continue to have the support of the governor of the CBN on all these initiatives that are meant to promote domestic industry and a lot of that is targeted at the CBN,” she further said.

Also speaking, Kai Orga, managing director, ARM investors’ managers, recounted her experience on how she broke many biases to rise to the top. She listed consistency, mindset and commitment as fundamental to success.

According to her, the biases that women often face are external and internal. While internal includes mindset, belief system, behaviour, pattern, character, inability to identify oneself and lack of clarity on goals; the external biases include school environment, family, politics, among others.