Wema Bank’s MD/CEO, Moruf Oseni, has stressed the need to provide a platform to address fundamental issues impacting micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and women in Nigeria, while also focusing on climate issues.
Speaking at the Bank’s Donor Roundtable, tagged “Innovative Financing: Gender-Lens and Climate-Resilient Solutions, held in Lagos, Oseni noted that MSMEs, despite being the largest employers of labour across the country, continued to suffer from problems of access to capital, development of critical managerial skills, access to markets, logistics challenges, a slowing economy, and heightened inflation, which ensured that most of them do not grow or even survive.
The CEO lamented the complications of climate change, saying it spurred significant shifts in human behaviour while adding further strain to societal dynamics.
For him, to address these problems, there is a need to create bespoke and innovative financing models that bridge funding disparities, stressing the need to ensure that these funding options offer flexibility and ease of access to the unique needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
“The world we face is a transformed one. The COVID-19 pandemic shut millions of people inside their homes and completely disrupted the global economy and the supply chain that underpins it. Global growth has been firmly below double digits for the last few years.
“Climate change has also unleashed a flood of migrants from the developing world into more developed countries. Pockets of conflict on the global stage have further exacerbated the growth problems we were already experiencing.
“The burden of this transformed world disproportionately falls on the youth and women in particular, who face higher unemployment rates across every strata of society,” he said.
Speaking on how technology can be leveraged for collaborative work, Felix Nwosu, the Productivity Lead for Nigeria at Microsoft, noted that with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), there’s a need to rethink the way we work and collaborate while emphasising that the world of work has fundamentally changed.
While giving demos, he explained that irrespective of the place and time zone, with the use of technology, meetings are held presently, while noting that in the future, technology will go further to give massive experience.
While speaking on initiatives in collaboration with Wema Bank, especially on women unemployment in Nigeria, Nneka Okekearu, Director of Enterprise Development Centre (EDC), Pan Atlantic University (PAU), explained that through the Transforming Youth Programme, Wema Bank is contributing to the development of young women entrepreneurs between the ages of 18 and 35.
She explained that with the deployment of technology, 3,000 women are receiving training to deepen their competencies in their area of interest, work on their mindset, and receive support.
Okekearu noted that at the end of the training, there would be impact assessments to determine how successful the programme is. She was, however, optimistic that the programme would be a huge success.
“We’re sure that we will have female entrepreneurs in the country that are stronger, more focused, have better-streamlined processes, and, most importantly, are profitable,” she said.
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