Development bank disburses N631 billion to MSMEs, others

The Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) has disbursed over N631 billion to over 313,000 micro, small and medium-scale enterprises (MSMEs) as of December 2022.

The value is a modest increase from N482 billion disbursed in 2021. It shows a 31 per cent growth in financing support and 50 per cent growth in MSMEs impacted.

Speaking in Abuja, at the yearly general meeting of the bank, the Managing Director, Dr. Tony Okpanachi, explained that of the total beneficiaries of DBN funds in five years, 67 per cent were women while 27 per cent were young people with well more than 250,000 jobs already created.

Recognising obstacles that confront MSMEs in assessing lending opportunities, Okpanachi said the bank has continued to explore various avenues to eliminate barriers to accessing funding by MSMEs, which places a strong importance on the role of scaling up capacity building for MSMEs.

According to him, the DBN developed a new partnership with Google Nigeria, a learning management platform and other organisations through which MSMEs can enroll in entrepreneurship courses for necessary upskilling.

On its performance during the year, he said the Bank achieved earnings of N47.6 billion and profit before tax of N29.5 billion. Its cost-to-income ratio was 15.9 per cent.

By the end of 2022, among the top sectors financed by DBN were women-dominated businesses such as trade and commerce, which helps the bank to strengthen MSME support.

“While the average tenor of MSME loans in the bank’s books used to be 18 months, it has increased to 36 months due to the impact of the long-term facility. By the end of 2022, utilisation of the long-term product was N150 billion. In addition, the bank is now able to extend its impact to start-ups by leveraging the finance-to-finance product. The 2022 financial year ended with N5 billion already channelled through the product,” he stated.