Trade Lenda, a leading digital bank with a core mandate of empowering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) announces the official launch of its fund targeted at supporting women and shariah complaint businesses.
Adeshina Adewumi, founder/CEO, Trade Lenda, “As you know, our core mandate is centered around empowering SMEs through strategic financing. Since May 2021, we have facilitated over $5million to support businesses and built systems to remove the access-to-finance gaps associated with growing a thriving business in Nigeria and soon the focus will be across various African markets.
“After closing our Pre-Seed in January 2023, we took a further step in entrenching our footprint across the grassroots and getting to know our user demography better. We rolled out various initiatives to bridge the financial and digital literacy gaps of small business owners across major markets in Nigeria.
“One of those initiatives included the Trade Lenda SME Fair held in Lagos and had the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of Nigeria, as our Father of the Day and Guest Speaker.
The program which was held in partnership with financial and non-financial institutions like Providus Bank, Paystack, Eazipay, Credo, Baobab+ among others saw representation of SMEs from across various States in Nigeria coming to Lagos, left us with explorative data that we needed to do more for Women and Shariah Complaint Businesses.
For the records, 90% representation were women-led businesses and top 5 businesses who won grants award out of over 2,000 applicants were women.
A journey which started off with Trade Lenda getting fully certified by the Shari’ah Board of Marble Advisory Limited on 11th January 2024 as well as various discussions in line with the theme for the United Nations International Women’s Day 2024 “Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress” has now seen us with a clear path with Marble Capital, FSDH Merchant Bank and Sterling Bank to support more women become financially included.
While I must say that we still have lots of other stakeholders in the pipeline, we are happy to launch today and commence tracking the dividends of empowering more women to grow and scale their businesses beyond Nigeria.
“While this specific fund announced is targeted specifically towards women and Shari’ah-Complaint businesses, we would continue to utilize our general pool from our ongoing Seed round to support businesses across gender agnostic lens.
“Over the last years, we have tracked the effect of empowering SMEs; Remarkably, new jobs have been created across our operators in Agriculture, Fast Consumer Moving Goods, Oil and Gas, Renewables and General Trading. One of our top customers recently rolled out their 4th Gas Plant in Plateau State Nigeria and we have lots of other success stories from across Nigeria. We believe this is just Day 1″, he said.
Find out more by emailing: info@tradelenda.com
Author
This news is not about the 10b launched but PR about the company and her recent events because there’s no info about how to access the fund