The Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) disbursed N190 billion to 7000 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in 2020 alone, the bank’s Executive Director/Chief Financial Officer , Ijeoma Ozulumba, has said.
A statement by the bank on Sunday said Ozulumba disclosed this at the first Techpreneur Summit organised by the DBN in Lagos at the weekend.
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“Since 2017 when the bank started, we’ve given loans to over 180,000 small businesses and those loans amount to over N400bn in various sectors of the economy and a lot of that also to tech based start-ups. In 2020, DBN disbursed N190bn and 7,000 of those SMEs accessed funding for the first time,” the statement quoted the DBN’s senior official has said.
According to her, the Techpreneur Summit underscores the ambition of DBN in creating a favourable space in the ecosystem for tech businesses.
In Nigeria, she said, ICT is now the biggest contributor to GDP as it has presently contributed 18% to GDP.
The Managing Director /Co-founder, Trans-Sahara Investment Corporation, Kyari Bukar called on Nigerian techy minds and techpreneurs to come up with local solutions that have universal appeal which can put Nigerian on the global technology table.
“Techpreneurship is about finding solutions, and the solutions better be local solutions and should also have universal appeal. If you stumble on a problem that we face here, and you come up with a better solution that the ones that exist, then the next thing is how you can build a business model around that.
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