Oluchi Chibuzor
With the need to boost local entrepreneurs across the country, the Grooming Endowment Trust has empowered 15 small and medium-sized enterprises with a total of N12.5 million grant to upscale their businesses.
This is aside from two weeks of business workshop and mentoring sessions facilitated by a seasoned consulting firm, the Centre for Research in Enterprise and Action in Management (CREM) across all sectors on business growth and sustainability.
At the GET Compass prize presentation, the Chairperson, Board of Trustees, Grooming Endowment Trust, Adaobi Okafor, said: “Creating an ecosystem for businesses remains critical for their survival.”
According to her, “At times people have amazing ideas, but funding, capacity and mentoring that they need are lacking. One thing is to start a business, but another thing is to sustain it to the end for them to gain traction.”
On why accelerating local SMEs with grant funds, she maintained that it was imperative for them to grow, while leveraging networks to upscale growth, sales and services.
In her words: “With the top five who received two million naira each, the other 10 SMEs will receive N250,000. This grant will help them to support their businesses along their value chains. The winners were grateful to the Grooming Endowing Trust.”
The CEO of Grooming Centre, Dr. Godwin Nwabunka, charged them to see the fund as a vehicle for growing their businesses.
He challenged SMEs in the country to lead growth across all sectors of the economy by investing properly into ventures that would give them return on investment.
According to him, “Our expectation for them is growth with many more initiatives and opportunities. We want to promise them that we will continue to use all these opportunities to grow the ecosystem so that we can support our environment with goods and services, create jobs and that way our youths will be productive.”
