Head of Agribusiness at Absa Bank, William Nettey, has advocated for more investment in women-led and women-focused businesses.

He was addressing stakeholders at a meeting on Climate Finance Opportunities in Ghana; and Financing SME Agribusinesses in West Africa, held on Wednesday, November 29, at the Marriott Hotel in Accra.

According to him, there is the need to inculcate gender-smart financing for agribusinesses into the climate financing framework to ensure gender equity and better outcomes for the programme.

He stated that at Absa Bank, funding schemes have been tailored particularly to cater to women entrepreneurs and enterprises that focus on women.

This focus, he said, has informed most of their recent collaborations to ensuring that women and women-focused enterprises are able to access much-needed funding for their businesses.

“Even before we started going into collaboration with startups it led us to increase the number of women that we are supporting.

“The women initiative allowed women business leaders to sort of form or to get into the position where they enjoy some benefits in terms of interest rates and being in charge of all of this. Because, like you mentioned, it's a known fact that women pay their loans better than men.

“And when it came to developing new products, like I mentioned, we indeed felt secured on the back of that. And it was said that the product should be for people at the lower end or the lower enterprises who are able to pay on a regular basis and the women were the ones who took up to that,” he explained.

He added that “Now going onto the partnership that we have, the Mastercard foundation, we have seen more women coming on board, and we ourselves have been very intentional at reaching these women.

“We do that through our other collaborations with rural banks and savings and loans just to make sure that specific money that we are giving to them are targeted towards women. And the book on that side is pretty good.”

The one-day climate financing conference, managed by EK Brand Consult, was powered by the Ghana Investment Support Programme and the British International Investment in collaboration with Pangea Africa, Climate Policy Initiative and Ghana Venture Capital.

The engagement saw panel discussions between public and private capital providers and entrepreneurs on ways to address ecosystem challenges around investing in undeserved SMEs engaged in climate positive actions.