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BoI reaches out to four million SMEs in five years

By Anthony Otaru, Abuja
25 January 2022   |   2:50 am
The Bank of Industry (BOI) said it has impacted over four million Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) through its Growth Platform, unlocking productivity and rolling back poverty

Executive Director Bank of Industry (BOI), Mrs. Toyin Adeniji(left); Managing Director, Olukayode Pitan; Chairman, Governing Board of the BOI, Aliyu AbdulRahman Dikko, and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, during the Launch of the Bank of Industry Growth Platform’s Aid for Productivity Report, in Abuja…yesterday

The Bank of Industry (BOI) said it has impacted over four million Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) through its Growth Platform, unlocking productivity and rolling back poverty in the last five years.

The Managing Director of the Bank, Olukayode Pitan, said this yesterday at the official launch of ‘Aid for Productivity’, a report that chronicles the bank’s Growth Platform achievements.

The report was unveiled by the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, who attributed the successes of the bank to the effective use of technology as well as the social network programmes put in place by the Federal Government.

Osinbajo said: “Growth Platform has been a powerful generator of opportunities for young entrepreneurs. People aged 18 to 35 make up 57 per cent of GEEP’s beneficiaries. The programme has also tackled the problem of women’s financial exclusion head-on, and today, the majority of its beneficiaries are female.

“Through GEEP alone, BOI has disbursed capital to over one million women-led MSMEs and helped over 150,000 of them to open bank accounts for the first time.”

Pitan said that the platform is Africa’s largest executor of MSMEs’ business interventions, employing technology, big data with an extensive field agent network to deliver programmes targeted at MSMEs.

According to him, the report surveys the achievements and insights into the programme’s revolutionary future potentials.

He said: “The good thing of the Growth Platform is to digitise millions of MSMEs and provide tranches of capital to them. This enables them to raise their productivity and incomes, strengthen their sustainability and contribute to job creation and economic development. The focus of the Growth Platform is a fundamental shift from aid for survival to aid for productivity.

“Growth Platform offers a seamless process, technology and field infrastructure for funds delivery to MSMEs, with the power of biometrics, BVN as digital collateral, mobile data, mobile wallets and strong network. Growth Platform can properly target, document, profile and deliver social interventions to MSMEs at a large scale.”

He stressed that BOI is ambitious in onboarding 25 million MSMEs by 2025.

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