Over five million businesses are set to benefit from Equity Group Holdings’ new plan dubbed Africa recovery and resilience plan for Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) aimed at enabling and fast-tracking the recovery of the regional economy following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Equity Group Director, Brent Malahay said the plan targets SME business and the private sector of the economy with the hopes to industrialize and bring job opportunities in Africa.
The group is focusing on primary sectors including agriculture and mining, manufacturing and logistics, trade and investments, MSMEs, social transformation and environmental financing. With this plan equity group aims to increase more market for export as they increase value edition
With hopes to support SMEs equity group will conduct financial literacy programs, entrepreneurship training programs and farmers’ training programs amongst many more.
‘’in the pilots right now we have a reach about 400 households with clean energy and what we have seen is it’s a whole industry that is developing as we increase the number of households that are adopting cleaner energy sources in schools is the whole industry of SMES or distributors or importers that needs to be financed to cope up with that demand and therefore we are looking at the entire ecosystem that is created from the opportunities presented in climate science’’ said Eric Naivasha, Associate Director, Equity Group Foundation.
Businesses in the country and the continent especially the MSMEs have faced various challenges including access to finance, with COVID-19 having made it even worse.
The bank now intends to take advantage and leverage on its balance sheet and the six markets where it operates in to drive the initiative.
In 2021, the lender conducted trade missions in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) when it sought to expand its market across the continent.
According to the bank, the initiative is likely to, directly and indirectly, contribute to 50 million jobs in the country. The program which has been in the pilot phase for almost a year has so far benefited over 2.3 million enterprises in financial literacy.
Equity group is also working on improving the environment by supporting 5000 SMES to deal with waste management in the aim of building back Africa green again
