By Sampson Unamka
As Nigeria joined its counterpart across the globe to celebrate the 2017 International Women’s Day, the Bank of Industry (BoI), has said that the womenfolk could create about 79,000 by 2019.
Group head, Gender Business, Bol, Mrs Adebisi Ajayi, stated this at the‘BoI 2017 International Women’s Day’ held in Lagos yesterday.
“As of today, we have businesses done by women that have created over 57,850 jobs created nationwide and the strategy of the BoI is a five year strategy which will terminate in 2019. And by our projection, we expect that 79,000 jobs would have been created by 2019.
We know that the population and demand are enormous, we can only encourage our sister banks to key into supporting Bol in financing the real sector and not just traders so that we can create jobs for people and develop the economy,” she maintained.
She said the major challenge women face in business is lack of proper corporate structure, adding that several measures have been taken by BoI to address this issue in other to attract funding from banks. “We have over 220 business development partners that help put documents together in an acceptable way to the bank whereby you can easily access funds,” said Ajayi.
Acting Managing Director, BoI, Mr Waheed Olagunju, who was represented by the Executive Director, Micro Enterprise Directorate, Mrs Toyin Adeniji, said the event was to recognise the role women has played in the empowerment of nations all across the world.
“From the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) we know that 30 percent of registered businesses in Nigeria are owned by women or led by women while 40 percent of Nigeria start ups are promoted by women.
At BoI, our lending activities and our portfolio in the last two years has doubled and that is a feat that is remarkable because it shows how much gender sensitive we are. We do recognize the high importance of women as an economic force and as a driver of transformation in Nigeria.
Our objective today is to provide a learning environment and
networking platform to help us as women make bold decision that will
take our businesses to the next level,” she stated
She explained that BoI is ready to support women; adding that the bank
has a dedicated gender desk that helps women across all the various
stages of their business.