Access Bank Plc has unveiled the second edition of its Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton programme, aimed at supporting female entrepreneurs.
The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton Africa 2020 Campaign was designed to provide female owned businesses across Africa an opportunity to access to finance and world-class business trainings as well as mentoring opportunities.
According to the bank, the programme was designed to create an enabling environment for female entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.
Speaking at the launch of the second edition of this initiative, Group Head W Initiative, Ayona Trimnell, was quoted to have said, “Access Bank has been a leading advocate for women’s economic empowerment in Nigeria and this is the key motivation for the ‘W’ Initiative which caters to the women economy particularly in the areas of capacity building and creating networking opportunities for women.”
She further stated that the Pitch-a-ton is an expansion of the Womenpreneur Business Workshop, under the Bank’s women proposition, the W Initiative.
“We launched the Pitch-a-ton initiative last year in line with our value proposition as the number one bank of choice for women in Nigeria, and we got a tremendous amount of applications with innovative business ideas. This year we want to do more and we want to reach out to more female entrepreneurs not just in Nigeria but across Africa.
“As a responsible financial institution with huge presence in other African countries, we want to give the same opportunity to other female entrepreneurs in Ghana, Rwanda and Zambia as well as Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Gambia, & Congo to apply and participate in this year’s edition of the programme,” she added.
The programme would provide up to N9 million financial grant and a unique capacity building program aimed at empowering women entrepreneurs.
The programme is designed as a 3-month period incorporating pitching sessions and 8 weeks of mini-MBA training in collaboration with the IFC. Interested persons from Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia and Rwanda as well as with extension to Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Gambia, & Congo who meet the criteria are required to fill an online application.
The 500 candidates selected from this pool would then send in a 60 seconds video pitch which would be screened by a credible panel of business experts to select fifty finalists.
As part of the graduation requirements, the 50 finalists will pitch their businesses, infusing learnings from the mini-MBA and will stand an opportunity to win financial grants up to N5 million.