AGRA, SMEDAN, EDC Move to Bridge Financing Gap for Agric SMEs, Targets 40% Women, 10% PWDs, 10,000 Youths

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA, in partnership with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, SMEDAN, and the Enterprise Development Centre, EDC, Business School, is working to improve the Nigerian Business Development Services, BDS, ecosystem to enhance access to finance for agricultural Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs. The BDS ecosystem project is focused on solving challenges limiting agric SMEs from scaling their businesses and is currently being implemented in Kaduna, Niger and Nasarawa States as pilot states, with plans to extend to other states in future programmes. Disclosing this during the final pitching contest for youth agripreneurs in Abuja on Thursday, the Program Officer of AGRA, Dr. Godswill Aguiyi, said agricultural SMEs, particularly youth-led enterprises, find it difficult to access finance compared to other sectors like oil and gas and importation, despite their critical role in food security. “The obvious problem is that agric SMEs do not have access to finance as it were compared to what you see in other sectors, for example oil and gas, people who do importation get more access to finance from banks, micro finance institutions and stuff like that, but the agriculture practitioners, agric youth SMEs find it difficult to get access to the financing they need to improve their businesses,” Dr. Aguiyi said. According to him, one of the activities under the project is the identification of young entrepreneurs doing outstanding work in the agriculture sector, with over 10,000 youths applying for the competition which was rigorously screened to about 30 finalists. “Under the BDS ecosystem project that we are doing with SMEDAN business school and EDC, we are trying to solve some of the problems that are limiting agric SMEs to improve their businesses. We are working in Kaduna State, Niger and Nasarawa State,” he said. He said the initiative is also aimed at encouraging youths to embrace agriculture at a time many are moving away from the sector. “It’s more like an encouragement to youths that are doing agriculture because many youths are running away from this particular sector, not interested to do agriculture because of the obvious reasons,” Dr. Aguiyi added. Also speaking, the Assistant Director, Enterprise Development and Promotion Department and Project Manager of SMEDAN, Dr. Funto Babarinde, said SMEDAN will disburse N17 million to 10 youth agripreneurs who will emerge winners at the final pitching contest of the AGRA-funded project. Dr. Babarinde said the project is a tripartite arrangement between business schools, SMEDAN and EDC Business School, funded by AGRA, and designed to strengthen the capacity of BDS provision and access to finance for Agricultural SMEs, AGSMEs, in Nigeria. “Well, this project is funded by AGRA so basically most of the financing for this project is coming from AGRA and this particular segment of this project is the youth innovation contest, we are looking at about seventeen million being distributed to the agric SMEs and youth specific agric SMEs,” Dr. Babarinde said. She explained the target is to have ten winners from a population of about ten thousand where the competition started. “These ten winners, the first category will be going home with five million naira, second category will be going home with three million naira and the third category will be going home with two million naira. We also have one million naira for the fourth to the tenth position,” she said. On inclusion of women and Persons With Disabilities, PWDs, Dr. Babarinde said gender and disability inclusion were built into the project design to ensure balanced representation. “To actually achieve this, we had inclusion in mind which meant that the pitch must carry a percentage for women, it must also carry a percentage for people with disabilities and also the general public which includes men and other genders,” she said. She disclosed that of the 30 finalists pitching, 20 are men and 10 are women, based on analysis of their proposals. “For this we are using 20 out of the 30, 20 are men, 10 are women for this particular pitch. Though that was not specifically indicated, it was a result of the analysis of their proposals that has led to that. We would have preferred more women but of course we can’t just put in the women, they have to be able to pitch their businesses and show that they can actually manage their businesses effectively,” Dr. Babarinde added. On his part, the Project Coordinator from Jesnoch International providing Technical Assistance to SMEDAN, Aina Godwin Taiye, said the BDS ecosystem project has prioritized gender inclusion, with women making up 40 to 60 per cent of beneficiaries and a minimum of 10 per cent reserved for persons with disabilities. “The ratio of men to women, though we have all categories actually covered, men, women and persons with disability, we have a minimum of I think five or ten per cent persons with disability and 40 to 60 per cent women to men,” Taiye said. Taiye, who is from Jesslock International, a leading consulting firm in Nigeria, said his organization is ensuring smooth running of the AGRA-funded project and is the custodian of the programme design and selection criteria. “As the TA we are the custodian of ensuring that the design of the program and to ensure that the top 30, right from the beginning of the design, even the selection of all the top 300 that participated in the online training, they meet the design criteria of fitting into an innovative agricultural space, ensuring that they fit into the age category and of course cover the focal states and by extension nationally,” he added.