For small and medium-sized enterprises to improve their chances of accessing funds, they need to present proposals that are rich and convincing for banks to fund, the Bank of Industry has said.

A statement from the bank quoted its Managing Director, Ms Evelyn Oputu, to have said this during a programme organised by the Enterprise Development Centre of the Pan Atlantic University with the theme, ‘Developing the SGB Sector’ held in Lagos on Saturday’.

The programme, organised for business executives, entrepreneurs and start-ups, was aimed at identifying areas of funding constraints and how such can be mitigated from a knowledge-based perspective of experts.

According to the statement, Oputu, while regretting the difficulty most SMEs face in their quest to secure funding for their businesses, said many entrepreneurs were not adequately equipped with the necessary information needed to secure loans. She said some, who had approached the bank in the past, were not even aware of the mandate and objectives of the BOI.

Apart from coming up with better proposals, she urged entrepreneurs to pay attention to details and gather enough information about funding agencies they intended to approach for support to enable them to  answer questions that might arise and to produce needed documents.

She said BOI, on its part, would continue to support the SME sector, which, she said, remained the engine room of growth of any economy as the real sector had the potential of generating massive employment.

The General Manager, BOI, Mr. Mohammed Abdul-Ganiyu, said the bank, which had managed series of intervention funds aimed at repositioning the industrial sector, had so far saved about 8,070 jobs in the textile sector, which led to the turnaround of 38 textile firms from imminent collapse.

He advised entrepreneurs in the sector to form cooperative groups so as to make it easier for them to access funds from the bank.

Some of the entrepreneurs at the event, however, lamented the high interest rates being charged by commercial banks, saying they were killing a lot of businesses.

Abdul-Ganiyu, however, said as a way of increasing funding to the SME sector, the BoI had in 2006, through its paradigm shift initiative, dedicated 85 per cent of its resources to the funding of the SME sector.