AGSMEIS fund to hit N90b by Dec-CBN

 

Three years after the Central Bank of Nigeria in collaboration with the Bankers Committee initiated the Agricultural Small and Medium Enterprises Investment Scheme (AGSMEIS), the fund is expected to hit N90 billion at the end of this year.
The apex bank also said that it has been able to disburse about N100 billion of the N210 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Fund.

Speaking at the end of the 10th Annual Bankers Committee Retreat in Lagos yesterday, the Governor of the CBN, Mr. Godwin Emefiele said the apex bank and the Bankers Committee which comprises of all the banks and regulators in the baking industry are not happy with the level of disbursement of the several interventions.

He said the AGSMIES fund by December this year will be N90 billion and part of which he said will be used to support those businesses that are into farming, trading as well as the creative industry, adding that of the N210 billion MSME fund, “just about 100 of it has been withdrawn, so I see opportunities for them (MSMEs) to access this credit and they can draw it in the area of export, the N500 billion export facilitation fund is also still available. We want those who will display genuine intention to take these loans, do their business and pay back.”

He noted that while some of the intervention funds are being taken up, the level of deployment was not encouraging. “It is very true that we have the MSME fund and indeed many other funds that are meant to be targeted at small holder farmers as well as those who are into micro or small businesses in Nigeria. We have disbursed part of that money but even we in the banking community are not happy that not all those funds have been disbursed so far and I must also confess that sometimes I feel embarrassed when people say are these funds here and how come we have not heard about it or how come we have not been able to access it.”

“So issues bothering on access to credit is a major bottleneck which the bankers’ community felt we needed to rectify and then think of how to resolve the issue. Under the Central Bank we have the commercial agriculture lending scheme, we have N210 billion set aside for MSMEs, we have close to N60 billion that is available to fund agric and small businesses and yet these monies are lying there, they are not been deployed to the people.

“We know we are doing our best in the area of Anchor Borrowers Programme where over 850,000 farmers have accessed the loans and where over N100 billion have been disbursed, but we are saying it is not enough. We are saying there is still more people who need to access this and then create jobs for people particularly in the rural communities and also improve the wealth in our rural areas. It is permeating but it is not moving as fast as we thought.”

He said, it informed the need to establish the National Microfinance Bank which in conjunction with the Nigeria Postal Service will be located in all local governments of the country to ensure that funds are made available to small and micro businesses.

Meanwhile, he said the Bankers Committee have set up committees to look into addressing bottlenecks in the access to credit in the export community as well as young entrepreneurs and the creative industry.

Speaking further he said “given the economic volatility and critical development in the Nigerian financial system, it is important that we renew our focus on non-oil exports that will help to catalyze economic growth and also eliminate over dependence of our country on crude oil as major source of earnings.

“The major focus remains that there are certain critical sectors of the country that require banking system support and we as banking system experts need to put in place strategy that will help to create access or make it easy for this people to access credit from the banks where they do require credit, enable it.

“What can we do as members in the banking community to assist them to overcome some of the challenges they face that will make it easy for them to continue to conduct their export business and also generate export earnings that we will use to run the Nigerian economy. So we have decided to set up a committee headed by a bank CEO

“What that committee will do is to take a deep dive into some of the issues and challenges faced by exporters and then report back to our February 2019 meeting to raise some of the issues, and through that the banks themselves will commit to ensuring that we deploy funds either on a commercial basis through banks or some of our intervention funds at the CBN to support this initiative.

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