The Bank of Industry, BOI, has challenged women entrepreneurs in the country to take advantages of its funding windows to improve their businesses and create more employment.
The General Manager, BOI, Joseph Babatunde made the call during the bank’s gender business group customers’ forum held in Lagos.
He noted that there are lots of issues requiring urgent attention in the nation, stressing that unemployment remains one of the critical issues that are yet to be addressed in Nigeria.
“As a development bank, the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is to see how many people we can create employment for using our different intervention funds. For us, this is very important and we want a situation where you can take advantage of most of the services we offer to improve your operations to get more people employed.”
According to him, the bank is working round the clock to improve its service delivery to customers.
“We are advising our customers to make available all the required documents to evaluate their proposal between 30 days and if they do not meet with this deadline, we will return whatever they have given us until they meet up with the full documentation for a loan application.
He explained that the thrust of the customer forum was to get feedback from some of its women customers to identify challenges, proffer solutions and improve its service delivery to its customers across the country.
“We want feedback from you beginning from when you applied for the loan; we want to know what has been your experience even up to the point of your operations. We want you to share with us what lessons you have learned to enable us to deliver better services,” he added.
Participants at the event called on the Development Finance Institution (DFI) to make working capital accessible and flexible while also raising the awareness of customers on the different initiatives offered by the bank to improve the business community.