Nigeria – The National Collateral Registry (NCR) says Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) can now easily obtain loans from financial institutions, leveraging their movable assets.
NCR’s Registrar, Bulus Zgbawa-Musa, said this during a Town Hall meeting for owners of MSMEs, held in collaboration with GIZ, a German development agency, on Thursday in Benin.
The meeting had the theme, “MSMEs’ Safe Haven: Improving Financial Access to the Nation’s Main Economy Drivers”.
Zgbawa-Musa, represented by Dr Xavier-Itan Okoh, an Assistant Director in the registry, said the meeting was a current awareness programme to educate and sensitise owners of small businesses on the development.
He said that the Central Bank of Nigeria, with the International Finance Corporation, established the NCR to assist MSMEs to leverage their movable assets such as equipment, vehicles, farm products and livestock as collateral for loans from financial institutions.
According to him, NCR is a notice-based registry for collateral; an online centralised, publicly available data that allows financial service providers to register security interests in movable assets after accepting such collateral for loans.
“This facilitates lending to individuals, farmers, macro entrepreneurs, and small and medium-scale businesses,” the registrar said.
He encouraged the participants to harness the opportunities provided by the NCR to upscale their business value chain, saying previous bogus assets required as collateral to access loans were no longer needed.
Zgbawa-Musa urged the owners of MSMEs present to utilize the opportunity of the meeting to ask relevant questions from representatives of financial institutions at the forum.
Earlier, Mr Olawale Afolabi of GIZ said though his organisation does not give loans, it provides technical cooperation to countries, as well as partners in private, public and civil organisations for sustainable economic growth and development.
Afolabi said that GIZ implements a Pro-Poor Growth and Promotion of Employment in Nigeria Programme – SEDIN, and works with partners on processes to improve outcomes, job creation and income.
(NAN)
