In line with its vision of growing the economy, Access Bank of Nigeria Plc says it is planning to train about 500,000 players in the Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) space, aside from assisting them with loans where necessary.
The Deputy Managing Director of the Bank, Chizoma Okoli, made the disclosure in Abuja at the 5th National MSME Award held at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. According to her, the bank has since unveiled the Access Bank SMEs zone, a robust blueprint designed specifically for supporting the MSMEs, in recognition of their strategic place in the economy. She revealed that Access Bank has already trained about 100,000 such small businesses after the management discovered that many of them needed to be educated on financials, cash flow management, HR, technology, and other areas.
She said: “Now, for us, we have invested a lot in infrastructure and technology to make sure that we support the SME sector. So, we have loans for SMEs both digitally otherwise, where they can sit down at the comfort of their homes and access up to N10 million without collateral.”
“We understand that SMEs contribute 90% of world businesses and 50% of employment. And what does that mean? That means that SMEs are an integral part of any economy. So, any economy that has no support for SMEs would not grow. But beyond the funds, many SMEs do not know the difference between company funds and their personal funds,” she added.
“So, we created the Access Bank SMEs zone, where we have over 100 training sessions for SMEs from training them on financials, on cash flow management, HR, technology, anything that they want, because it’s beyond giving them money. We’ve trained over 100,000 SMEs on that platform. This year, we’re targeting to train 500,000 businesses.”
Okoli emphasised the bank’s determination to assist private sector players, adding that it has always partnered with the MSMEs award due to its objective of growing SMEs, who in turn grow the economy.
