Ogun empowers 30,000 women entrepreneurs with N700m

In line with governor Ibikunle Amosun’s government employment and poverty reduction initiative tagged “Ogun State Ministry of Affairs Gender Empowerment Programme, more than 30,000 women entrepreneurs are targeted to benefit from the N700 million Small and Medium Enterprises fund provided by government in partnership with Ecobank Plc and Astra Polaris Micro Finance Bank. So far, about 15,000 women had so far benefitted in the first and second phases of the scheme where N100 million and N200 million were disbursed to women entreprenuers respectively.

Speaking on the empowerment scheme, Elizabeth Sonubi, Commissioner of Women Affiars and Social Development, whose ministry handles the Small and Medium Enterprises Fund, said that disbursement of the fund, which started in 2012, was executed by the government to create wealth and alleviate poverty among women folks in the state.

She noted that although, the ministry has been training hundreds of jobless girls and women on various skills and vocations, including Catering, Fashion Designing, Hair dressing, Barbing, Knitting and Shoe making under its Vocational Skills Acquisition Training Programme, “it is not enough if fund like SME Fund is not introduced to further empower the women.”

Sonubi disclosed that government undertook the empowerment scheme to create wealth and employment opportunities for women entrepreneurs and jobless youths and women to alleviate poverty, thereby reducing crime rate in the State communities, saying the scheme would also prevent broken homes, matrimonial disharmony, child abandonment, child trafficking and other related crimes that plague socio-economic development of the state.

Commenting on the empowerment initiative, Akintunde Ogunsan, Managing Director and Taofeek Ogunjimi, Executive Director, Astra Polaris Micro Finance Bank, the corresponding financial house through which the loan is disbursed stated as follows: “We started with N30,000 with some people and now they are saying that they can do with N25,000 and when you actually go to their stores, you can see that they are doing fine; some of them have given us great results. The only challenge lies with political beneficiaries.”

“The experience has been very interesting. The impact has been massive…We have attended to over 15,000 people and our target is more than N300,000 people. We believe what the government has done is very good … it is teaching people how to feed but not to feed. Properly structured empowerment is far better than distributing fund as many people envisage.”

Also Jaiyeola Adeshina, Financial Controller, Astra Polaris MFB submitted that the single-digit- -interest-rate SME fund had not only helped improve and stimulate the economic activities of the players and businesses in the SME value chain, but had also inculcated banking culture in many traders who hitherto did not have anything to do with banks and banking system. “So far, we have about 60% of our women that are compliant with banking system and we do transfer of fund for them” Adeshina noted.

Elizabeth Shabi, one of the beneficiaries of the empowerment scheme confirmed to BusinessDay that the interest on the loan is friendly and they had no stress in repaying the loan.

RAZAQ AYINLA