Heritage Bank boosts young entrepreneurs with credit

Heritage Bank Plc has reiterated plans to provide timely and affordable credit to assist youths in implementing their business ideas, thereby providing the mechanism of stimulating growth, reducing unemployment as well as addressing restiveness.

Consequently, the bank has embarked on several wealth creation programmes in order to curb unemployment among youths as part of effort to boost entrepreneurship that will lead the recovery of the Nigerian economy.

One of such schemes is the administering and management of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s N3billion Youth Innovative Entrepreneurship Development Programme (YIEDP), with the aim to emancipate the latent entrepreneurial spirit in the teeming youths by providing adequate and affordable loans to execute their business ideas.

The apex bank adopted Heritage Bank as its pilot bank for the Youth Entrepreneurship Development Programme (YIEDP) in collaboration with National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). The programme, which targets 10,000 youths in productive activities within the next four years, should focus on dependable job-creating sectors, such as agricultural value chain (fish farming, poultry, snail farming), cottage industry, mining and solid minerals, creative industry (tourism, arts and crafts), and Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

However, the on-going Stream-3 Application portal opened August 8th, while portal update as at August 26th with 2, 724 applicants and only 1,078 application forms were completed.

The bank advised the remaining 1,393 applicants to complete their applications, and if challenges occur, applicants should call the bank’s contact centre for assistance and resolution.

Meanwhile, Heritage Bank in partnership with the Centre for Values in Leadership (CVL) recently graduated 100 young entrepreneurs in the CVL Young Entrepreneurship Training Programme (YETP) in Ajegunle, Lagos.

The CVL is aimed at identifying young people, especially youths in densely populated communities and putting them through a full year of training in small business management.

These young entrepreneurs who have been trained in various skills such as catering, bead making, event management, fashion design, arts, hair dressing, shoe cobbling among others, have also imbibed comprehensive business management and entrepreneurship skills that would equip them to be successful business owners.

The managing director/CEO of Heritage Bank Plc, Ife Sekibo, restated that the aim of Heritage Bank being in the forefront of youth empowerment is to emancipate the latent entrepreneurial spirit in the teeming youths, by providing adequate and affordable loans to execute their business ideas and, hopefully, migrate them to successful Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), thereby, providing the mechanism of stimulating growth, reducing unemployment as well as addressing youth restiveness in the economy. Sekibo added that “the bank’s passionate interest in the programme also arises from the fact that the initiative aligns very much with the vision of the bank, which is to help partners create, preserve and transfer wealth across generations.”