Access Bank Women Entrepreneurs Programme Opens Season 8 With IFC

NIGERIA · BUSINESS & FINANCE

Nigeria’s biggest bank by assets is opening the eighth edition of its flagship women’s entrepreneurship programme — and this time the training is explicitly designed to turn graduates into bankable borrowers.

Access Bank women entrepreneurs are getting a new doorway into formal finance. The lender has launched Season 8 of its Womenpreneur Pitch-A-Ton Africa programme, with 120 women set to begin an intensive three-week mini-MBA in November 2026, ThisDay reported.

The new edition, announced on 9 September, is being implemented in partnership with the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector arm. It combines classroom training with financial support: in addition to the programme’s top grant, 19 other beneficiaries will receive funding, according to Oge Kasie-Nwachukwu, Access Bank’s acting group head for marketing and retail analytics.

Seven Seasons, 1,141 Graduates

The programme has quietly become one of the largest bank-run entrepreneurship pipelines on the continent. Nene Kunle-Ogunlusi, Access Bank’s head of women banking, said more than 1,141 women across ten African countries have been trained over the past seven seasons, with grants in excess of US$200,000 distributed to participants.

Alumni have started to collect external validation. Graduates have won the Nigeria MSME Awards in consecutive years, and one participant secured a US$100,000 prize in a separate competition — outcomes the bank cites as evidence that the training travels beyond its own balance sheet.

Entry is competitive. Under the rules applied in recent editions, applicants must be women aged 18 to 55 who own at least 50 percent of a business that has operated for at least one year. The 2024 edition awarded a combined ₦17.5 million (about US$13,200) to ten winners, Legit.ng reported at the time.

Training Aimed at Credit Readiness

Season 8’s design makes the programme’s commercial logic explicit. Chizobar Iheme, Access Bank’s group head of consumer banking, said financial inclusion must go beyond bringing women into the formal banking system. “Financial inclusion is more than just integrating women into the banking system; it’s about empowering them with the skills necessary to thrive at every stage of their journey,” she said.

Iheme pointed to the high failure rate of businesses within their first five years as the reason for the programme’s focus on structure and financial discipline. “We want to ensure that when women apply for loans, they meet all necessary qualifications and are fully prepared to succeed,” she added. Kasie-Nwachukwu said the bank had introduced “further enhancements” for Season 8 to improve participating businesses’ performance.

The Money Behind the Programme

The training sits on top of a much larger funding architecture. In October 2023 Access Bank signed a €50 million (about US$57 million) credit facility with the European Investment Bank aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, with at least 30 percent ring-fenced for women-led businesses.

In May 2025 the bank secured a US$100 million senior loan from a group of development finance institutions led by Germany’s DEG, alongside FinDev Canada, ILX and Austria’s OeEB, again with a minimum 30 percent gender-lens allocation, MSME Africa reported. That followed a US$50 million commitment from British International Investment inside a US$295 million package arranged by FMO in July 2024.

At bank level, Access Bank says it has extended more than ₦246.46 billion (about US$185 million) in financing to 3,145,319 women over 17 years — a figure it disclosed when announcing the EIB partnership. The Pitch-A-Ton pipeline is the visible front end of that strategy: trained graduates become loan applicants the bank already knows.

Why Women-Owned Businesses Are the Target

The gap the bank is chasing is structural. Women-owned enterprises make up about 40 percent of Nigeria’s micro, small and medium-sized businesses, yet account for only around 11 percent of banks’ MSME loan books. The World Bank and the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative estimate the financing shortfall for women-owned SMEs in Nigeria at roughly US$18 billion.

For Access Bank, that gap is a market rather than a charity case. Women entrepreneurs who pass through training and receive early grants are more likely to become long-term borrowers, deposit holders and advocates for the brand — a defensible position in a segment most Nigerian lenders have historically underserved.

What to Watch

The immediate milestone is the November 2026 start of the three-week mini-MBA for the 120 selected participants. Beyond that, the metrics that matter are conversion rates: how many graduates go on to access formal credit, and whether the US$100 million DFI facility produces measurable growth in the bank’s lending to women-led SMEs.

With development finance institutions now routing hundreds of millions of dollars through Access Bank’s gender-lens channels, Season 8 will be read well beyond Lagos as a test of whether bank-run academies can genuinely close Africa’s women’s finance gap — or merely train entrepreneurs the credit system still declines.