dfcu Bank Executive Director and Chief Commercial Officer William Sekabembe addressing the participants
The training for the first cohort of women under the Business Accelerator Program, an initiative of dfcu bank, Agribusiness Development Centre and Rabo Foundation has started.
The four-month training is aimed at equipping businesses and their owners with financial management skills and governance. The trainees are heads of women owned agribusiness enterprises.
Officiating at the opening of the training Tuesday at the dfcu headquarters in Kampala, the Bank’s Executive Director – William Sekabembe said that 52% of the workforce in the country are women.
He noted that the bank is also “mindful that women go through a lot of challenges to startup businesses and sustain them, but the other thing is that when they borrow, they pay and those are statistics.”
“There are different and specific activities that we have done to support women. The Business Accelerator Program looks at agribusiness and the value chain is wide, it is not just about farming. Our mission is that we want you to improve your financial management. Most of you are family owned businesses. One of the challenges that we have seen with family owned businesses is sustainability, the businesses don’t live to see more than two or three anniversaries,” Sekabembe said.
He added: “By the end of the training, you should be able to come to us and borrow and be able to pay back but also to make you more bankable. By the end of this cohort, you must be our customer and you must ask us, what loan products do you have for me? Who is my relationship manager? Where is the next branch I can go and transact? You have to be more bankable, if we don’t achieve that, then we have not achieved our mission.”
According to Sekabembe, the idea is to transform businesses to become better.
“We are here to transform you, to transform your business so that you become a better person and when you are borrowing, we can lend you 20, 50 million or a billion shilling. That’s our mission,” he said.
In explaining how much dfcu is involved in supporting agriculture, Sekabembe said 20% of the bank’s loan portfolio which he said is Shs1.5 trillion is in agriculture.
“We do a lot of training and financing for agriculture. We have also partnered with the government in the Agriculture Credit Facility and it’s one of the big off takers of the facility. What we now want to improve is how do we get the smallholder farmers who are highly fragmented to get into the formal financial sector so as to access finance. So, I hope that by the end of the four months, you are a better manager, you are a better entity otherwise the four months you are going to spend here will have gone to waste,” Sekabembe noted.
The other area of interest, according to Sekabembe, is governance.
“The other mission is governance. Governance is as simple as setting the rules and playing by it. If you are making a profit, you don’t have to employ your friends and family who are not competent. You need to be holding people accountable. You need to have certain standards that apply from the onset,” Sekabembe told trainees.
He appealed to trainees to consider joining or forming investment clubs because a good percentage of developments in the country are owned by Investment Clubs. He says DFCU has about 40, 000 Investment Clubs.
“When you talk about DFCU, two things come to mind. Investment club and women in business. I am not here to talk about Investment Clubs but I thought I needed to highlight that,”
Over the years, dfcu bank has trained over 80, 000 business owners. Out of those, 6, 000 have taken a loan from the bank.
