The Bank of Industry (BoI) says women promote 40 percent of Nigerian start-ups and own 30 percent of registered businesses in the country.
Waheed Olagunju, acting managing director, BoI said at an International Women’s Day event held in Lagos that Nigerian women were the promoters of 40 percent of start-ups in the country.
Olagunju, who was represented by Toyin Adeniji, executive director for Micro Enterprise Directorate, BoI, said it would be a great mistake to exclude women from places where policies and decisions were made.
“Nigeria cannot afford to ignore the role and contributions of women in our country,” Olagunju said at an event entitled, ‘Promoting Bold Footprints in Business’.
He said the development finance institution’s lending activities and its portfolio in the last two years had doubled, which was a remarkable feat, showing how much gender sensitive the bank was.
“We do recognise the high importance of women as an economic force and as a driver of transformation in Nigeria,” he added.
Adebisi Ajayi, group head, gender business, BoI, said, “As of today, we have businesses done by women that have created over 57,850 jobs created nationwide and BoI has 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.”
Ajayi said the major challenge facing women in business was lack of proper corporate structure, adding that several measures had been taken by BoI to address this issue in order to attract funding from banks.
Babatunde Joseph, divisional head, Large Enterprises, BoI, said women made up seven percent of workforce in agriculture.
Babatunde said access to capital had always been an issue for women entrepreneur in Nigeria and also for many developing countries.
“Women are most likely to face different types of discriminations in doing business in terms of cultural and religious harassments, hindrances in assessment and work balance issue than men entrepreneurs,” he said.
He said it was important to support women enterprises, urging more sensitisation to encourage women entrepreneurs, stating that this would yield tangible results.
ODINAKA ANUDU & ANTHONIA OBOKOH
