By Modupe Gbadeyanka
The Bank of Industry (BoI) has emphasised that its N10 billion Youths Entrepreneurship Support Programme (YES-P) is a loan and not a grant as being speculated in some quarters.
The industry financial institution made this clarification on Sunday in Lagos through its Acting Managing Director, Mr Waheed Olagunju.
However, the BoI said it would review the terms and conditions of its two schemes and fine-tune them without violating the prudential guidelines of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
According to Mr Olagunju, the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) was a Federal Government based grant while the BoI YES-P is a lending programme aimed at promoting youth entrepreneurship.
He said, “About 70,000 applications were received, we discovered that because we said N5 million will be the highest, some people made multiple entries.
“By the time the Enterprise Development Centre of the Pan Atlantic University, the major development centre driving the process, did their checks, they realised that out of the 70,000 entries, about 40,000 were false entries.”
Mr Olagunju said further that, “The applicants thought that the N5 million was per person and they were saying that if this is YES-P, it could be like SURE-P.
“Most grants, particularly in our environment are not viable and sustainable because you are not trained and capacity is not built, so this is why the emphasis is on viability and sustainability.”
He added that, “Our credit policy is predicated on the prudential guidelines and because we are a lending institution, we have to ensure that we operate within the law and operate within those guidelines.
“We cannot convert YES-P to SURE-P but we will continue to see how we can increase the access of our youths to the range of financial products that we offer at BoI, at much lower costs than commercial banks, because we lend at single digit rate.”
