As part of its promise to
continuously provide financial and business skills to female
entrepreneurs, leading retail bank in Nigeria, Access Bank Plc has unveiled the
second
edition of its Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton programme.
The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton Africa 2020 Campaign is designed to provide female
owned
businesses across Africa an opportunity to access to finance and world-class
business
trainings as well as mentoring opportunities.
This programme has been designed to
create an enabling environment for female entrepreneurs to grow their
businesses.
Speaking at the launch of the second
edition of this initiative, Ayona Trimnell, Group
Head W Initiative, said, “Access Bank has been a leading advocate for women’s
economic empowerment in Nigeria and this is the key motivation for the ‘W’
Initiative
which caters to the women economy particularly in the areas of capacity
building and
creating networking opportunities for women”.
She further stated that the
Pitch-a-ton is an expansion of the Womenpreneur Business Workshop, under the
Bank’s women proposition, the W Initiative. “We launched the Pitch-a-ton initiative
last year in line with our value proposition as the No. 1 Bank of Choice for
women in Nigeria, and we got a tremendous amount of applications with
innovative business ideas. This year we want to do more and we want to reach
out to more female entrepreneurs not just in Nigeria
but across Africa.
“As a responsible financial
institution with huge presence in other African countries, we want to give the
same opportunity to other female entrepreneurs in Ghana, Rwanda and Zambia as
well as Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Gambia, & Congo to apply and
participate in this year’s edition of the programme.
The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton Africa
2020 will provide up to N9 million financial grant
and a unique capacity building program aimed at empowering women entrepreneurs.
The programme is designed as a 3-month period incorporating pitching sessions
and 8
weeks of mini-MBA training in collaboration with the IFC. Interested persons
from
Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia and Rwanda as well as with extension to Sierra Leone,
Mozambique, Gambia, & Congo who meet the criteria are required to fill
an online
application. The five hundred candidates selected from this pool will then send
in a sixty
seconds video pitch which will be screened by a credible panel of business
experts to
select fifty finalists.
As part of the graduation
requirements, the fifty finalists will pitch their businesses,
infusing learnings from the mini-MBA and will stand an opportunity to win
financial
grants up to N5 million.
As a leading commercial bank in
Nigeria, Access Bank has made significant
investments aimed at enhancing growth in the Small and Medium-size Enterprise
sector. The Bank is also a major advocate for women in business through
innovative
offerings like the W Power Loan, a discounted financing at 15% interest per
annum, for
women to grow their business as well as other Business Support Services.
The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton is the
first women-in-business support initiative of its
kind in the industry. Please click HERE to know more.