BusinessDay Media Limited, West Africa’s leading provider of business and financial intelligence, has signed a new partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The partnership will focus on addressing the problem of financial exclusion in the country.
The partnership is aimed at promoting financial inclusion in Africa’s largest economy where the government and the central bank have been working with various stakeholder groups to expand access to financial services, using simple technologies.
Specifically, in the course of the partnership, BusinessDay will create and publish content highlighting the ideals of financial inclusion, drawing examples from successes around the world, with a view to aggregating champions and advocates in the country to lead the push for opening access to financial services for more Nigerians, especially the poor.
During the work, BusinessDay will also build on results from two broad based research work by its Research and Intelligence Unit, BRIU, as well as build on outcomes of two stakeholder events with the main objective of bringing together policy leaders as well as financial and technology professionals to discuss and chart better ways of expanding the pool of Nigerians with access to financial services.
BusinessDay believes that through this work, it can shed more light on the fact that financial exclusion exacerbates the failure of society to harness and accumulate resources among the rural poor, which in turn results in reducing the pool of cheap long term investible capital needed for economic development.
As part of this project, BusinessDay will create constant coverage of digital financial services in an effort to crowd in private sector voices around making Digital Financial Services a priority for Nigeria.
“Our remit is to leverage our established expertise in providing succinct coverage around financial inclusion, digital financial services and help build a network of influencers that actively drive the depths and widths of the conversation around financial exclusion in Nigeria,” says BusinessDay CEO, Frank Aigbogun.
“Nations can forge ahead by successfully pooling together the dormant resources of their people, especially those outside the financial system and this can have significant and far reaching economic and social implications for the people,” Aigbogun added.
