Oyedeji: Access to Finance, Market, Pose Challenges to Female Entrepreneurs in Africa

 

Recently, Ecobank Nigeria had a special free exhibition and networking workshop for female entrepreneurs as part of activities to commemorate 2022 International

Women’s Day (IWD). The Executive Director, Commercial Banking, Carol Oyedeji, in this interview with Kayode Tokede highlights major challenges facing female entrepreneurs and what initiatives the bank is offering to drive aggressive female’s participation in entrepreneurs where it has branches in Africa. 

What are the major challenges of SMEs in Africa?

Number one is access to finance and the reason is that most times, they do not know the structure of their business. Number two is access to the market as they do not know how to package their goods. The third one is capacity building by understanding their business very well and actually ensuring they sell them. Ecobank the pan African bank is out to help businesses with all of these.

How has Ecobank strengthened SMEs as regards the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)?

As you likely know, Ecobank is one of the largest African banks with operations in over 33 countries. Which other bank do you think has the capacity to support entrepreneurs as much as we do? With such experts and presence in Africa, we have been able to create that access.

Access can be down to referrals, creating visibility for our customers across the different market in Africa. Because we have a presence in different markets in Africa, we have been able to tell them how each market environments are and support them as much as possible. Those sorts of benefits are the things we have been able to bring to the table.

 How is Ellevate by Ecobank Nigeria empowering women to enhance economic growth?

As you likely know, we launched our Ellevate proportion in May of 2021, and Ellevate is focused on women and organizations that produce goods for women, organizations that have dominated women in leadership, and organizations that have a large proportion of women.

So our focus is to support these organizations to grow and enhance economic growth. What we do is to provide financing benefits to them and to encourage them to create value in the economy.

In Ellevate, funding is one of those ways as well as non-funding. The non-financing can be through capacity development where we train women micro-entrepreneurs so that they can stand on their own and add value to society.

What has been the contribution of Ellevate to the bottom-line growth of Ecobank?

I can say Ellevate’s contribution to our bottom line is significant.

 How many jobs has Ellevate created almost a year it was launched?

Because we have supported a large number of decision-makers in this category, the created jobs opportunities are significant.

How much loans has the bank granted since Ellevate was launched?

I can also tell you the loans granted since it was launched is significant too. We have a large number of women dedicated to our Ellevate program and so a large number of our loans have been granted to women in that category.

 What has been the impact of Ellevate in women’s financial inclusion?

In Africa, one in five entrepreneurs is a woman. We are supporting that category and because we are supporting that category whether formally or informally, they add value to the entire financial inclusion system. If you notice, women do not occupy top positions, and they could not do much because they were not empowered financially and understands the knowledge of their business. With Ellevate, you can imagine the impact of this category of those who were excluded from the financial system which Ellevate is adding value to.

 Why is Ellevate different from Ecobank’s other products?

Ellevate is not a product but a proposition. When I say proposition, it actually transcends several products. Once you’re a female-focused business owner; make products for women and employees are women, it was created to support women’s proposition. 

The supports are through financing your business through concession on the interest rate; we train your staff as much as possible to understand their business and create access for them in the international market. We have our sister entities in our 33 countries in Africa. When I say create access, we have been able to provide experts that will train them.