WorldStage Newsonline– Access Bank has partnered with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsave Consulting Global Consulting Pte Ltd. to improve financial services for low-income women in rural communities across the country.
According to a statement, the initiative is to empower women economically by providing them with access to financial resources, education, and opportunities.
Mr Robert Giles, Senior Retail Advisor in Access Bank, on Thursday, said that the initiative would focus on scaling female agent networks in Nigeria
According to Giles, this is to expand successful programmes and increase the number and quality of female Cash-In, Cash-Out (CICO) agents in Nigeria.
He said that the project would address challenges like limited access to finance, financial education and training on managing an agent banking business in your community.
“This programme specifically focuses on helping more women become agents and to be more successful as agents, and the project is looking at factors around the social norms in different parts of the country.
“We’re looking at how we use data to identify who will be a successful agent and then how we help develop those agents to get the best outcomes. We’re also looking at how we can lend to those agents and how we can help them also lend into the community across Nigeria.
“We have over 60 million customers, and many of them prefer to be supported by agents. So the closer we can situate our agents to business activity, the more we can take the friction out of banking, and we’ve been able to do this over a long period of time,” he said.
Mrs Chizoba Iheme, Group Head, Agency Banking and Financial Inclusion in Access Bank, said the project would help more female agents to be successful in agency banking.
She said, “We have just signed a partnership with MSC Global Consulting Pte Ltd. and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to impact fifty thousand female agents.
“These are agents that carry out cash-in, cash-out across the country.
“We will lend to empower them to do more transactions, get gender-based disagregated data that will help us determine the true behaviour of a female agent.
“We will lend to these agents and also get them to lend to their customers. There will be capacity building initiatives and customised onboarding for these agents.
“This will help us drive financial inclusion in Nigeria, and we have designed a duration of three years to actualise this.”
Mr Akshat Pathak, Associate Partner at Microsave Consulting, stated that the partnership was launched in response to the observation that banking touchpoints in rural areas were still lagging behind.
Pathak noted that it was important for any financial institution to have a healthy balance of male and female agents as part of their network.
He explained that Access Bank had put in a lot of hard work to building its retail banking business, and the company is, in turn, supporting the bank in further expanding their agent networks.
“We have partnered with Access Bank and on a project which looks at scaling female agent networks across Nigeria. Agent networks in any country across Africa are very critical to improving financial inclusion for that particular country.
“If we have more female representatives as part of a financial network, we will empower many female customers at the end of the day.
“So, I feel our partnership with Access Bank is very important and we are looking at northern and central Nigeria as our key focus areas now; female agents as one of the key focus areas too.
“We will be looking for specific areas wherein we found that the penetration of banking touch points are still behind the curve.
“So, the idea is that we don’t go to a place wherein there is already infrastructure present. We need to identify those places where there are gaps in the infrastructure and how can we fill those gaps,” he said.
