The Bank of Industry (BoI), has refuted claims in some quarters that the Permanent Voters Card (PVC) is one of the requirements for benefitting from the TraderMoni and other loan schemes by the Federal Government.
Speaking at a public function organised by the BoI, recently, the Executive Director, Micro Enterprise, BoI, Toyin Adeniji, said that TraderMoni is not a free handout, and not a gift or a vote-buying scheme as some public commentators alleged, but a loan that beneficiaries have to pay back.
She said it was as a result of this wrong notion that PVC was excluded from the loan requirement.
“Under no circumstances is a Permanent Voter Card or any political indication requested when applying for these loans,” she stated.
Adeniji said that the criteria for accessing the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP), include being a verified trader with a verified place of trade and possession of a Bank Verification Number (BVN) for MarketMoni and FarmerMoni.
She further stated, that the beneficiary must be a member of a certified market association or cooperative society and having a bank account or mobile wallet. “Beneficiaries then go through a verification process at the Bank of Industry, before the disbursement,” she added. Adeniji said that GEEP leverages on a private sector-driven agent network that is spread across the 36 states of the federation, to enumerate beneficiaries.
According to her, agents were prohibited from requesting for any information not listed in the criteria for each facility.
She said that every single candidate for the GEEP is enumerated at their point of trade by one of the over 4,000 agents bearing tablet devices or smartphones.
She added that of the approximately 5 million candidates enumerated till date, 1.5 million have qualified and received the loans across all GEEP products.
“The entire operation of GEEP is technology driven; BVN is validated against the NIBSS database; background checks are done against third party data sources, and all enumeration is done on the agent’s tablet devices that feed the information into a central BoI database,” she said. TraderMoni, MarketMoni and FarmerMoni are micro credit loan schemes for petty traders and farmers managed by the BoI under the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP), one of the social intervention programmes (SIPs) of the Federal Government.