Kuda Microfinance Bank (Kuda MFB) has increased total grants on offer in the Kuda For Her Pitch Challenge to ₦10 million after receiving an overwhelming number of pitches from women entrepreneurs in the food and hospitality sectors.
Kuda MFB
The initiative, which launched on March 10 as part of Kuda’s Women’s Month activities and closed on March 16, was designed to award four women-led businesses a grant of ₦1 million each.
In acknowledgement of the number and quality of pitches for grants received, Kuda MFB will now give ten Lagos-based entrepreneurs ₦1 million each to fund the growth of their businesses.
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According to the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), women own about 43 percent of micro and small enterprises in Nigeria, many of which operate in the food and hospitality sectors.
But despite their strong presence in those sectors, women entrepreneurs continue to face challenges getting the funding they need to grow their businesses, with only about 23 percent of women-owned businesses currently able to access formal credit.
Insights from Kuda Business’ soon-to-be-released SME Outlook report also reinforces this trend. In a survey of 86 Lagos-based small businesses using Kuda Business, 47.5 percent of respondents identified lack of financing as the biggest barrier to expanding their operations, far ahead of other challenges such as rising operating costs (26.2 percent) and access to customers (14.8 per cent). Logistics constraints and regulatory hurdles were cited by 6.6 per cent and 4.9 per cent of respondents, respectively.
The survey also found that when choosing a banking partner, access to credit ranked as the most important feature for small businesses, cited by 38.5 percent of respondents. This was followed by easy payment tools (27.7 percent), low fees (26.2 percent), and customer support (7.7 percent).
Funding to increase the grants came from money that Kuda MFB had earmarked for a Kuda for Her seminar, which it has now cancelled.
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Emmanuel Femi-Adejobi, Senior Brand Manager at Kuda, said: “The pitches we received made it very clear that women building businesses in Nigeria’s food and hospitality sectors urgently need capital to grow.
We cancelled our planned seminar and diverted some of the budget for it to give six more grants so that more women entrepreneurs will have extra financial support to grow and contribute more to Nigeria’s economic growth. At this time, that money means more to the entrepreneurs we serve than a seminar.”
Kuda MFB will announce the ten grant recipients on March 27.
