The Bank of Industry (BoI), in collaboration with the Kaduna State government and Kaduna Business School, have developed a business development programme aimed at training 4,500 business operators in the state.
Tagged: “Kaduna Startup Entrepreneurship Program,”(KADSTEP), the programme is tailored towards improving the capacity of some select small and medium business operators in the state who-who have been penciled to benefit from the various loan programmes of the BoI.
Under the KADSTED programme, successful small business operators would be leveraging on the existing N1billion matching fund.
Acting Managing director of BoI, Mr. Waheed Olagunju, speaking during the signing of the deal, said the entrepreneurship programme would help to rev up economic activities in the state through the creation of job opportunities.
“The Kaduna Startup Entrepreneurship Programme (KADSTEP),” is a sustainable job creation initiative designed with entrepreneurship as the common denominator. The programme is designed to run for 4 years in the first instance and the overreaching goal is the creation of a minimum 20,000 jobs in the intervention period through the registration and expansion of the capacities of about 3,500-4,500 businesses operating across the 23 local government in the state,” he said.
According to Olagunju, the programme was targeting the creation of 3,500 new businesses across the 23 local governments in the state,this is also in addition to building capacity for entrepreneurial management among the youth, 100 percent utilization of funds with the BoI, Bank of Agriculture,(BoA), Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), creation of a minimum of 20,000 jobs and improving the internally generated in the state.
Executive governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-rufai,said that his government decided to go into partnership with the development finance institution because of his firm conviction that the purpose of government is to create an enabling environment suitable for job creation.