The Bank of Industry, BOI,
weekend, launched N5 billion Cottage Agro Processing (CAP) Fund.Mr. Rasheed
Olaoluwa, the Managing Director of the bank, said that existing operators in
the sector as well as prospective young Nigerians who want to go into farming
can take advantage of the fund to establish mini mills for processing agro
products such as cassava, cashew, oil palm, rice paddy, groundnut, yam, maize
and sorghum, etc.
Cassava farm
According to him, for
applicants to qualify for the loan, they must meet both the generic and
specific requirements as stipulated by the bank. “For
me I think for any applicant to access the loan, let me first of all mention
the generic requirements before the specific ones.
The generic requirements are
that when you are applying for loans at BOI, you must clearly articulate your
business model.
The business model should
answer the following four questions: what is the product you are offering, what
is your target market; who are you going to sell this product to and why should
anybody buy your product because there are a lot of such products in the
market, so why should anybody buy it?
How are you going to create
the product to ensure that it actually comes out? For me, if you can articulate
those issues, I think we have a basis for very interesting discussion. So, that
is generic.
“The general requirements are that this particular fund
is for agro products; that means you must have a processing factory that
processes crop into food products or intermediate raw materials for industries.
The agreed product must be
available in sufficient quantity; we are not looking at a massive transport
cost, so we expect that you locate your factory very close to where the raw
materials are available so that your transport cost is minimal.
“We expect that you identify an equipment supplier that
is accredited by BOI and we expect that you articulate personnel requirements
that are within the limit of your budget; we expect that you identify some
market for the product you want to sell. These are basic elements of business
model that we expect you to do.
“For people who may not be able to do this, we are
appointing business services development firms to help. They will provide the
services that are almost next to nothing to the applicants.
It will ensure their chance
of success at the BOI. Right now a lot of applications that come to BOI don’t
meet standard. What we want to do is to increase the success rate of loan
applications that come to us, especially from the SMEs.”
He further explained that it
is a direct intervention fund by BOI, adding , “the
only involvement by commercial banks will be limited to what we called the SMEs
friendly banks to able to participate in the working capital components of the
loan. The working capital component is only 10 percent.
We have a list of commercial
banks that we have identified; we had meetings with them and they have agreed
to. The SMEs stakeholders like NASME, have agreed with the list of the banks
and if those banks are interested in providing the 10 percent working capita we
will go ahead with them but if they are not, BOI is prepared to do that
directly.
On equipment suppliers, he
said “the applicant is not at liberty to bring just any
equipment supplier of his choice; we have people that have been certified and
if you want to bring in new equipment supplier, it will also go through a
process of certification to ensure that they can supply the right equipment
that can actually process the agric product to food products or ultimate raw
materials for industries.
Also, we are going to have a
performance Bond and they are going to give us a warranty and sign a
mainta\enance agreement. The kind of things that have gone wrong in the past we
want to to make sure they don’t happen this time
around. So the equipment is well fabricated, well installed it is likely to
perform. Now ,if the unlikely event any of the equipment suppliers disappoint,
we will black list such suppliers and they will not tbe entitltle to
participate in this programme.
I must say the Federal
Institute of Industrial Research, Oshodi, is going to play a major role in
working with us on this project becausae I visited FIIRO recently and clearly
they have developed a number of very interesting technologies that are
dedicated towards agro processing but those technologies have not been promoted
widely.
A few Nigerian businessmen
and women have gone to FIIRO and have taken these technologies and they have
turned their small business to very large business today; some of them are
doing hundred millions of naira in turnover today. So we have FIIRO as a major
partner under this product.”
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