Vice President Yemi Osinbajo last week, resumed his technically suspended nationwide tour of disbursing TraderMoni and MarketMoni, a soft loan scheme targeted at traders and SMEs in select open markets in Nigeria.
Business Hilights had on April 24, 2019, published a story; https://businesshilights.com.ng/nigerians-query-why-vice-president-halted-tradermoni-after-2019-elections/, asking questions on whether the original aim of the market visits was for vote buying ahead of the recently concluded elections or to demonstrate support for struggling SMEs in local markets.
However, in a statement issued by the Executive director Micro enterprises at the Bank of Industry (BoI), Toyin Adeniji, and emailed to Business Hilights, the lender noted that the resumed programme is to sustain its continued efforts to meet the primary objective of “broadening financial inclusion, and increasing access to affordable credit for traders and small business owners. This phase will target at least 2,000 new beneficiaries. This is in addition to the over 30,000 beneficiaries that received the GEEP loans in the first phase, between 2017 and 2018.”
Recall that both TraderMoni and MarketMoni were designed to support traders and SMEs as a programme and introduced in 2017 with resource from Bank of Industry and monitored from the office of the Vice President.
It was gathered that the latest visit of the Vice President and BoI activation team to Anambra State last week was to access the performance of the (GEEP) products and assure Nigerians
The visitation team was at Eke Awka main market and interacted with benefiting traders.
