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Business News of Monday, 14 September 2020

Source: thenationonlineng.net

Multimillion-naira project for women, SMEs, jobs coming

Dr. Lola Dare Dr. Lola Dare

A social organisation, Chestrad Global, has announced a multimillion-naira project aimed at creating more opportunities for young people and women.

The project will focus on expanding capital requirement amount and access to credit for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This is seen as a major requirement for business growth and job creation.

The firm’s Chief Executive, Dr. Lola Dare, said the project was designed to address the major obstacles that women face their businesses.

According to her, the project will also fund coaching opportunities through the entrepreneurial lifecycle to build the necessary skills and capacity for success.

“Tariroi, a South African word meaning ‘Hope’, is a health and financial inclusion programme which gives and expands access of children, girls and women to financial products and services. Tariro, will as a special purpose vehicle under this programme target women in urban slums in Lagos and leverage financial services and technology to enable 500,000 women, and through them also give additional two million children access to qualitative services in health, nutrition, and early learning,” Dare explained.

She added that the project would establish multi-service Tariro Centres (TC) in urban slums Lagos. “The TCs will offer financial services to increase economic opportunities for girls (10 to 14 years) and women (15 to 65 years), enabling them to purchase basic live saving outpatient health care services. It is scheduled for two and half years.

She said the project’s approach is to target women in three main urban slums in Lagos, (Ikota, Eti-Osa, Iba, Ojo and Olowogbowo). Collectively, these serve a population of over 3.5 million people, 55 per cent of whom are estimated to be women and girls 10-65 years) and children (under 60 months).

“Our strategy is if everyone commits to giving N5,000 monthly, we can reach these 500,000 women without much external help. Project Tariro seeks to impact on women, girls and children under five years in the above listed three urban slums in Lagos state; through innovations in financing and effective leverage of technology to track performance, validate coverage by basic health and early learning services ensuring that no mother or child is left behind or denied access to inputs to survive, thrive and excel,” Dare added.