The Ministry of Women Affairs has partnered with Wema Bank to launch MOWA x SARA Accelerator Programme, an initiative aimed at empowering 500,000 women across Nigeria with vocational and business management skills.
The initiative is Wema Bank’s women-focused proposition established with the goal of promoting gender inclusion and equality by empowering women with tailored resources, opportunities and solutions essential to enable them thrive personally and professionally.
Wema Bank, through SARA hopes to empower thousands of women across Nigeria with access to financial support, market, networking opportunities, affordable healthcare and a host of other benefits curated specifically for women.
The programme is set to run for 24 months and will cover 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. The focus will be on two areas: vocational skills and business management skills with a schedule encompassing two days of soft skills and business management skills, followed by two days of vocational training. The final day will be dedicated to an assessment and evaluation session.
For vocational skills, the programme will target three main aspects which include food processing, fashion designing and hairdressing. The five-day in-person training session will be organised into eight cohorts with the initial pilot phase starting in Anambra and spanning to Ekiti and Kano. This capacity building and women empowerment programme will equip more Nigerian women to earn revenue, become economically active, contribute to national development and will ultimately serve to further bridge the gap in gender inclusion.
Speaking on the initiative, Wema Bank’s Executive Director of Retail and Digital, Tunde Mabawonku, expressed confidence in the programme’s potential for empowering women to thrive.
According to her, “Nigeria’s ever-evolving macroeconomic landscape calls for an acutely intentional approach to providing tailored solutions and opportunities to empower our people, especially the women. At Wema Bank, we understand this need as captured in our mission of empowering lives through innovation and we are very intentional about tailoring our empowerment efforts to the needs of our diverse customer demographics. This commitment is evident in our solutions, partnerships, products, initiatives, and propositions; one of which is SARA by Wema.
“Recognising the need for tailored solutions that help women thrive, we launched SARA in 2019 as a dedicated avenue for reaching out to women across Nigeria, empowering them with unique solutions tailored to their needs even beyond banking, and providing them with the support they need to maximise their potential. This is the basis of our work through SARA, and this is what has informed the launch of MOWA x SARA Accelerator Programme. Our goal is to help women navigate the challenging economic terrain by providing them with skills for self-employment, resources for productivity and support for success.
“I encourage every woman out there who is willing to learn a skill with potential for income generation, to register for the MOWA x SARA Accelerator Programme. We also have grants reserved for this programme, so it’s a total package designed to help these women become economically active. Inclusion runs deep for us so we have curated this programme such that women of various ages from any part of the country can participate and reap the benefits of this programme.
“To every woman out there, I also take this opportunity to invite you to join the SARA Community, our community for women who want better. There are so many opportunities rooted in the SARA and every woman can tap into this extensive range of benefits as a SARA Woman.”
The Minister for Women Affairs, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, added, “This partnership is beyond the Federal Ministry of Women Affair, it extends to the Nigerian Women Affairs. Our goal is to ensure the sustainability of all women empowerment initiatives, which is why we are bringing in the private sector. On this project, Wema Bank is evidently ready to fly and we are committed to flying together to achieve our objectives”.