Access Bank Excites Female SMEs across Africa with Womenpreneur Pitch-A-Ton Second Edition
As part of its promise to continuously provide financial and business skills to female entrepreneurs, leading retail bank, Access Bank has unveiled the second edition of its “Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton” campaign.
The “Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton” Africa 2020 Campaign is designed to provide female owned businesses across Africa an opportunity to access finance and world-class business trainings as well as mentoring opportunities. This programme has been designed to create an enabling environment for female entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.
Speaking at the launch of the second edition of this initiative, the Group Head for W Initiative at Access Bank Plc., Ayona Trimnell said, “Access Bank has been a leading advocate for women’s economic empowerment in Africa 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 No. 1 Bank of Choice for women in Africa, 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 across Africa to apply including Ghana, Rwanda, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Congo”, she added.
The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton Africa 2020 will provide over RWF 23,310,000 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, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Congo who meet the criteria are required to fill an online application. The five hundred candidates selected from this pool will then send in a sixty seconds video pitch which will be screened by a credible panel of business experts to select fifty finalists.
As part of the graduation requirements, the fifty finalists will pitch their businesses, infusing learnings from the mini-MBA and will stand an opportunity to win financial grants of about RWF 12,950,000.
Using the opportunity to encourage more women to participate in the campaign, the Managing Director for Access Bank Rwanda, Jean-Claude Karayenzi added that “As Access Bank Rwanda, we are committed to contribute towards The Government’s efforts to empower women by encouraging women entrepreneurs through innovative offerings and programs that we believe will add value to their businesses/lives”
The Womenpreneur Pitch-a-ton is the first women-in-business support initiative of its kind in the industry and interested participants can learn more on https://www.womenpreneur.ng/
Access Bank has been using various strategies to engage its customers to boost their business viability, particularly during this period of COVID-19 pandemic including the “W Webinar Series” which tackles various topics of business continuity, redesigning business model for resilience among others.
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