Five Nigerian Women Wins Access Bank N9.75m business Grants After a Successful Business Pitch
- Access bank has selected five Nigerian women for a grant of N9 million from its womenpreneur Pitch-A-Ton Africa initiative
- The initiative is with support from International Finance Corporation (IFC) and will also see the women mentored
- This is the third year the Pitch-A-Ton Africa initiative was launched and over 200 women have benefited
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Access Bank Plc on Tuesday, December 7, awarded 100 women with the International Finance Corporation mini-MBA and financial grants of N9.75 million to the top five women in the bank’s Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton Season 3 grand finale.
The hybrid ceremony took place at the Access Bank Towers in Lagos. In attendance at the event were women entrepreneurs from all over Africa.
Speaking at the event, the Group Managing Director of Access Bank, Dr. Herbert Wigwe, explained that the programme was introduced by the bank to assist women in creating a sustainable and successful enterprise and to help them prepare their business plans.
Source: UGC
Wigwe said:
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“One of the problems people have in starting a business is they don’t have a convincing business plan and they think they can just jump into it. Now what we’ll do to support you is that we will support you in setting up a business plan, we will support you in terms of understanding how to maintain accounting so that you will understand the difference between cash flow, sales and profits, among others.
“And sometimes that’s all somebody needs to make a big push; and for the most sophisticated women, we will take them across a more interesting journey around succession. Some of them seem not to know how to solve their problems, so we will take them and show them the diversity of options and help them to create basically the nature of business that they require.
“Already we have up to 37,000 applicants from female owned businesses from over 10 countries. The top candidates pitched their businesses to an independent jury consisting of industries across the continent.
“The top five will receive awards worth $22,000, an additional 10 winners have earned consolation prizes.”
Wigwe also noted that the Access Bank partnered with SME.ng to create ablymarketplace, an e-commerce platform to ensure all graduates are listed as vendors for one year.
He also added the programme would be fully sponsored by the W-Initiative of Access Bank.
On the unique propositions of the W.Initative, the Access Bank GMD explained that the programme was designed to provide quality training as well as financial and business skills to female entrepreneurs in Africa through an IFC certified mini MBA.
Nigeria largest banks by customer deposits
In a related story, Legit.ng had earlier reported that the total customer deposits in nine Nigerian banks climbed to N30.81 trillion at the end of the first quarter of this year, up from N29.73 trillion in December 2020.
The report revealed that United Bank for Africa Plc was the top bank in terms of customer deposits as of March 31, 2021, with deposits growing to N5.79 trillion from N5.68 trillion in December.
While Access Bank Plc came in second, boosting client deposits to N5.68 trillion in March from N5.59 trillion at the end of last year.
Source: Legit.ng
