On Friday 6th April 2021, CitiBank announced the Supply Chain Finance Programme supporting women-owned Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in partnership with 4G Capital, a leading FinTech.
The programme is intended to support women financially to conduct businesses with corporate clients with a Ksh300million Inclusive Finance financing facility.
“Not only do we provide them with financing to ensure they are empowered to do business, but we have held sessions for specific customers for this supply chain finance programme, ” revealed the bank’s Chief Executive Officer and East Africa Cluster Head, Mr Martin A. Mugambi.
“We identify these women early and get them to become part of our procurement process here in the bank so that as we procure services, we are also targeting women-owned business. We are trying to increase this number to 40% of our supply chain,”
He disclosed that Citibank, alongside 4G Capital, would support 25,000 entities through their smart partnership. The capital they intend to incur would be a specific outcome that is measurable and would scale up a smart partnership.
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“We have programmes of supporting women-owned businesses, particularly Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). We have the Citi Supply Chain Finance Programme, which provides financing to the value chain of our multi-national clients,” he said.
The CEO added that the bank takes the gender agenda seriously to promote women to drive inclusion. “In Citi, there is no bigger statement than celebrating
our new Citigroup Global CEO Jane Fraser, who started on March 1st, 2021.
She is the first woman to be the CEO in Citi’s 209-year history. That speaks volumes in terms of the direction the organization is taking to promote women to very senior levels of leadership,” Mr Mugambi added.
The conference was attended by key women in leadership and business from Kenya, Uganda, South Africa and Zambia. The conference speakers included Patricia Okelo, Founder, Willart Productions Limited Kenya Kayana, Phyllis Wakiaga, Chief Executive Officer, Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) and Floor Overbeeke, Country Director TechnoServe, Kendi Ntwiga -Nderitu – Country Manager Microsoft Kenya, Eva Ngigi- Sarwari, Country Leader Visa and Neeta Narendra – Managing Director Devki Group of Companies.
In 2020, Citi supported US$289million (about Kshs 31.5 billion) in social/inclusive finance debt transactions to fund businesses and microfinance institutions, enabling them to issue more than 415,000 new loans to women globally.
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