Ime Akpan
The Bank of Industry (BoI) has begun to disburse N15, 000 to TraderMoni beneficiaries in Lagos, Borno, Ogun and Oyo states who paid back their first N10, 000 loans.
Spokesman for the vice president, Mr. Laolu Akande stated this in a statement on progress report on the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) micro-credit products -TraderMoni, MarketMoni, and FarmerMoni – issued in Abuja on Thursday.
Akande also stated that since the end of the 2019 elections “a target of 30,000 minimum beneficiaries per state has been achieved in majority of the 36 states and FCT.”
Under the TraderMoni scheme, he said an initial N10,000 loan is given to petty traders and once they repay within six months, they can receive a new N15,000 loan and when they repay that they can get another N20,000 loan until they get as much as N100,000.
“What the implementing agency has been doing since the last phase of disbursements is generating the balance of programme funding while ramping up on the states with shortages.
“Consequently, disbursements have continued to happen in the states; for instance, we have had over 28,000 disbursements across 10 states since after the elections. Our priority is ramping up these numbers in the balance of states before we move to phase two of the programme after detailed reviews and structural enhancements for larger scale.
“Under the Next Level Agenda, TraderMoni loans will target ten million petty traders, a significant ramp up from the initial target of two million beneficiaries.”
He also said the ministry for industry, trade and investment was involved in the implementation of the scheme.
“That ministry is, in fact, the over sighting BoI, which is the deploying agency. The office of the minister executes the GEEP programme via the Bank of Industry.
“The governance structure of GEEP includes the office of the vice president (national social investment office), the ministry of trade and investment, and the BoI.”
Speaking on measures adopted to enhance repayments, Akande said GEEP had pioneered innovative solutions to drive repayment compliance.
“Working with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS), we successfully piloted the concept of the BVN as digital collateral and we saw repayment go up significantly on the MarketMoni and FarmerMoni loans.
“For TraderMoni, beneficiaries can pay back at any commercial bank in the country…all they need to provide in the bank teller is their phone number. We also developed and successfully piloted scratch cards as a repayment option for beneficiaries who stay kilometres away from the nearest banks in their community. The cards are loaded the same way recharge cards are loaded, thus requiring no new learning curve,” he said.
He maintained that GEEP’s vision “remains to empower the over 30 million Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria with interest-free, collateral-free loans.”
