PAN-AFRICAN bank, Ecobank has relaunched its ‘Ellevate’ program that supports women-owned and led businesses with accessible financial products.
The relaunch comes at a time female-led businesses across the continent continue to face barriers to accessing lines of credit to expand business operations or retool.
Women comprise 40 percent of Zimbabwe’s workforce and constitute roughly half of the population.
Ellevate, which was relaunched last week, seeks to ensure that women and women-led businesses have access to and can use multiple financial services as tools to develop their financial freedom and allow them to contribute meaningfully to economic growth.
“We are saying relaunch because we launched during COVID-19 and we did it online but we felt that we need to do the networking more and the explaining better now that the environment has gone back to normal,” Ecobank head of consumer banking, Patricia Musemesi said at the launch event.
She said the product is aimed at enabling women who do not have security or assets to give to banks when they want to borrow.
“We felt that women were disadvantaged as a community and we needed to have a specific product that focuses on women so that we try and enable and give them the advantage they would have lost out. We have to do that because we are not given that opportunity growing up because people prefer to fund the male child.
“So, we want to have a product that will be specific to them and allow them to access finance without having to go behind a man to support them but to stand on their own feet and be able to say if the business is good enough, we can then bank.”
Musemesi said the product is eligible for all who have new ideas and business that is already running and the bank has four pillars where they are measuring how they can assist namely, entrepreneurship pillar, leadership pillar, employment pillar and consumption pillar.
“The first pillar is the entrepreneurship pillar where we are saying if you have 50 percent ownership by women be it husband and wife but there is a 50, 50 percent ownership, we consider you under the programme. We also have leadership qualifications were if you have 20 percent or more of your employees as women you also qualify or if you have 20 percent of your board members as female.