Folakemi Falodun is the General Manager for Paga’s Digital Financial Services business and merchant payment services. Folakemi who has over 10 years of experience working in several roles within Finance and e-commerce in Nigeria and the United Kingdom speaks on Covid-19 and how Paga assists organisations to grow. Excerpts
Paga recently launched Donate.ng in response to COVID-19, could you share some insight into the idea and motivation behind this?
Donate.ng is a donation website that we launched as part of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this platform is to support credible initiatives and courses helping Nigerians during these difficult times by ensuring that they access financial support. We selected three non-profit organizations each working in different areas of need; from health education to feeding poorer families and communities and increasing testing outlets available in the country. In the coming months, we will be extending this platform to other (non-COVID) initiatives and humanitarian courses.
How does Donate.ng work?
The website hosts campaigns on behalf of organizations, also known as Sponsors. These sponsors have gone through our verification process to ensure that they are credible and ensure that the funds that are donated on this platform are used for the stated purpose.
We have made the experience for the donors very simple and straight to the point. Interested donors can visit the website – www.donate.ng, to access information on the campaigns and choose to donate towards any or all of the campaigns. The payment on this platform is powered by Paga’s payment gateway – Checkout which simplifies the payment for donors both locally and internationally. We support payment from all sources – wallet, bank and cards (local and international). The funds collected from this platform is remitted in to designated accounts set up on Paga for each organization and Paga monitors to ensure they appropriately put to use.
Can you tell us about the organizations you are currently working with on donate.ng and why you chose them?
We are working with three organizations. The first one is Flying Doctors Health Investment Company, this is the company behind Flying Doctors Nigeria. The company recently innovated mobile testing centers to help health workers to scale the COVID-19 testing across the country. These mobile booths offer very secure ways for the health workers to administer the required tests on patients; significantly reducing the risk of exposure and cost of disposable PPEs.
The second organization is Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh (DRASA) Health Trust, this is a public health organization that was established in memory of Nigeria’s Ebola heroine, the late Dr. Ameyo Stella Adadevoh. To date the firm has trained over 1,100 health workers on how to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and empowered more than 500 youths to become health and hygiene ambassadors in their schools and communities. We are supporting them to be able to reach more people in more states across the country.
The third organization is Kinabuti and Friends, this is an NGO that provides food and shelter to poorer families and communities. This NGO has extended its outreach to cater for families whose livelihoods have been affected as a result of the pandemic by providing regular feeding allowances to these families. We are working with the organisation to take these programs to more communities across Lagos.
Has Paga put any measures in place to ensure the donations get to the right organisations?
Yes indeed. As I mentioned earlier, we have carried out due diligence on each of the organizations and reviewed the track record. The funds are deposited into a secure Paga account which we monitor to ensure the funds are not mismanaged.
Could you share more initiatives Paga is currently pushing through DFS?
We recently launched an investment platform on Paga as part of our DFS initiatives, in partnership with Wealthtech, a subsidiary of Sankore Investments. With this platform, our customers can save their money and invest directly from their wallet. This service is available on our website – www.paga.com.
What is Paga’s role in promoting payments for Merchants and small businesses?
We are at the forefront of supporting businesses; well established ones and the smaller ones to collect payments securely digitally. We help businesses collect payments through all our digital channels; web, app, USSD and our agent network. In addition to this, we provide payment gateways to businesses who want to collect payments on their own websites and apps. Lastly, we support businesses who have limited resources with our PayMe page that serves as a customized website for SMEs to display their goods and services, this PayMe page also comes with a payment link that they can plug into their social media pages or share directly within their networks for instant payments.
