Access Bank’s head of sustainability, Omobolanle Victor- Laniyan, at a recently held United Nations Global Compact Business Live event revealed the practical ways the bank was working to ensure the application of its sustainability pact.
Emphasising the interrelatedness of innovation, sustainability and collaboration in helping organisations navigate policies in their business operations, Victor- Laniyan noted that Access Bank has collaborated with various stakeholders and built models that highlight this.
“Through our partnership with Smefunds, a social enterprise, we have sought to end poverty by promoting sustainable enterprise development. This partnership helps nature to recover itself by curbing the felling and selling of trees in rural Nigerian communities. Furthermore, following the launch of the new Access Bank brand in 2019, we launched the Paper2pencil initiative, that enabled us to convert old branded notebooks and paper into pencils. Today, we’ve distributed those pencils to over 10,030 students across Nigeria,” Victor-Laniyan said.
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Despite the environmental and health implications of cooking with firewood, with some 93000 annual deaths related to smoke inhalation from household pollution caused by firewood smoke (per data from The International Centre for Energy, Environment, and Development), millions of Nigerian households still employ this cooking method. To curb this issue, Access Bank distributed bio gel powered cooking technology to entrepreneurs (predominantly female), while also training and issuing grants to help beneficiaries start-off their respective businesses.
Asked how the COVID- 19 pandemic has affected private-public sector partnership, Victor-Laniyan opined that COVID-19 had accelerated public-private sector partnership, citing the Access Bank led Coalition Against COVID- 19 (CACOVID) as one example among many. The initiative stepped in to improve Nigeria’s testing and treatment capacity at the onset on the pandemic, setting up state of the art testing and treatment centres across the country.
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