CBN- EDC trains 135 entrepreneurs in Osogbo
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in conjunction with Entrepreneurship Development Centre (EDC), South-west zone, has trained 135 entrepreneurs in Osogbo, Osun State capital.
The training, managed by the Africa Leadership Forum, lasted for four weeks. Participants were exposed to modules such as mindset reengineering to help them rethink business, money, and livelihood; enterprise development and idea generation; business and financial management, as well as marketing and interpersonal relationship. Participants also wrote individual business plans.
At the graduation ceremony held at the Teacher’s Cooperative House in Oshogbo, Olumide Ajayi, program director of the CBN-EDC South-west, said out of the 135 persons that had undergone the training, 125 (93 percent) had submitted their business plans, saying that the State Micro-Credit Agency would start interacting with them henceforth. Ajayi urged the graduands not to waste the money they would be given for their businesses but ensure that they created enterprises and employed other people. He commended the state for being enterprising and for being the first in south-west Nigeria to sponsor individuals and create an avenue for the training of this magnitude since its commencement in March 2015.
He pointed out that the initiative would make the State of Osun a model for the other states in the South-west.
As at the end of the first batch of training, 21 people had already registered for the second batch of the training.
Dayo Babaranti, general manager and CEO of the Osun Microcredit Agency, who also addressed the trainees, encouraged them to persevere in their ventures, saying that “people can only take risks against waste but not uncertainty”
Babaranti elucidated the available interventions for the funding for businesses which included the Microcredit agency: N1,000 to N1,000,000; Bank of Industry (BoI) Fund, minimum of N5,000,000; and commercial banks N10million to N50million, all at maximum nine percent interest rate. He finally urged the trainees to do businesses they were passionate about and not fund other persons’ ideas.
Oluyemisi Adebayo, representative of the Central Bank of Nigeria, said that the apex bank was leveraging on research which showed that economies thrived on the MSMEs, hence the CBN’s MSMSE’s development fund, YIEDP, Agric Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund, Financial Inclusion Program, among others.
In her remark, Grace Titi Laoye Tomori, deputy governor of the state, emphasised that it was improper that artisans from neighbouring countries would be preferred to Nigerian artisans. “The era of oil boom is gone and we have to take our hands to work. With some of the business plans that were presented at the event, I believe things have changed in the state,” Tomori said.
“This is not the first time that the CBN-EDC South-west has partnered with the people of Osun State to provide entrepreneurship training cum business development services. Seventy-five SMEs were trained through cooperative groups that organised entrepreneurship training for her members in July 2016,” she added.