The Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) has disbursed N400 billion as loans to 150,000 small and medium enterprises across the country in the last four years, the Managing Director, Tony Okpanachi said.
Okpanachi said this in a speech at the 2nd virtual DBN Lecture Series over the weekend.
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“Since commencing operations in 2017, we have disbursed over N400bn in loans to over 150,000 MSMEs, 27% are women- and 28% youth-owned, creating over 130,000 jobs,” he said.
Okpanachi said N190bn was disbursed in 2020 alone through 19 Participating Financial Institutions (PFIs) out of which N9.8bn was given to 6,935 first-time borrowers, N5.7bn to 9,066 youth- and N11.8bn to 25,171 women-owned businesses.
Cumulatively, he said, 83% of the beneficiaries reported increases in their sales, after they obtained the loans, while 48% were able to increase their staff strength.
He explained that 125 MSMEs were also trained as part of the bank’s capacity-building initiative through the DBN Entrepreneurship Training programme which was held in Abuja and Lagos.
DBN Chairman, Shehu Yahaya, said despite the intervention efforts of the government there remains a huge financing gap of over N600bn according to the PWC report.
Prof. Benedict Oramah, President of AFREXIM Bank, represented by Denys Denya (Executive Vice President–Finance, Administration and Banking Services), commended DBN for the creative steps being taken by the bank to develop the micro small and medium scale enterprise.
The National Bureau of Statistics report showed that GDP increased by 5% in Q2 2021.
