Access Bank has joined forces with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsave Consulting Global Consulting Pte Ltd. to enhance financial inclusion for low-income women in rural parts of Nigeria.
The collaborative project aims to economically empower 50,000 women by improving their access to financial services, business training, and credit. A key component of the initiative is the expansion and development of female agent networks across underserved communities.
Mr Robert Giles, Senior Retail Advisor at Access Bank, on Thursday said 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 disaggregated 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 build its retail banking business, and the company is, in turn, supporting the bank in further expanding its agent networks.
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