The Lagos state government (LASG) has kicked off its COVID-19 Action Recovery and Economic Stimulus (CARES) Program, with 100 women from the Alimosho local government area starting with the digital literacy training and other grants.
The CARES program is a state-level intervention that seeks to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on businesses by providing credit grant, operations grant and IT enhancement grant thereby supporting the recovery of local economic activity especially among Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), and protecting the livelihoods of existing, newly poor and vulnerable households, while strengthening institutional support for coordination and delivery.
Teju Abisoye, Executive Secretary of the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF), said the plan is to empower 5000 women with digital literacy training and POS smartphones starting with 500 women at the pilot phase.
“The first phase will be implemented in five local government areas starting Alimosho LGA where 100 women who do not have smartphones, fall between the ages of 18 and 50, run micro-enterprises and are living on the poverty line will be empowered,” she said.
Abisoye also said the initiative will address low digital literacy, lack of accessibility to smartphones, low access to finance and high unemployment among women especially with the POS system, which allows beneficiaries to act as agency bankers by collecting payments via the phone’s POS terminal earning them $200 to $300 per month which is more than the minimum wage.
Read also: UNILAG to partner NOD for automobiles assemblage
“Furthermore, the initiative will provide a larger and more diverse market for the MSMEs while helping them keep and manage records for accountability, profitability and documentation to further improve their operations,” she added.
To monitor the progress, nine master trainers who are liaison officers who have been trained will be spread across the different LGAs will in turn train the beneficiaries
As a follow-up, Abisoye said that an impact assessment exercise will be carried out to assess its impact and confirm how helpful the program has been for beneficiaries and see if there is a need to review the conditions of the initiative.
Partnering with the Lagos state government on this project is Bookings Africa, to provide digital literacy training, monitoring and evaluation, MTN Nigeria to provide subsidized data, Access bank to provide a payment platform and the University of Lagos to provide the white paper for research purposes.
Fade Ogunro, founder and CEO of Bookings Africa, while speaking to the first set of beneficiaries said that the unprecedented outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a lot of disruptions especially for the MSMEs and adversely affected their business operations.
“This experience has taught us to create buffers against such occurrence leveraging technology and to protect MSMEs from such risks in future, but first businesses need to get back on their feet,” she said.
