NCGC Targets N100bn Credit for Women After First-Year Gender Gap

Women accounted for just 16.8 per cent of the beneficiaries of credit mobilised by the National Credit Guarantee Company (NCGC) in its first year, highlighting the persistent gender gap in access to formal financing and prompting a new initiative targeting more than N100 billion in credit for female-led businesses.

NCGC’s inaugural impact report, released in August 2026, showed that 11,374 of the 67,512 end-borrowers reached through its guarantee programmes were women-owned businesses.

Overall, the company provided N21.59 billion in risk cover through 19 participating financial institutions, unlocking N46.95 billion in direct loans across 25 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

The credit reached businesses through 13 commercial banks, three microfinance banks and three development finance institutions, while an estimated 661,291 direct and indirect jobs were supported.

The report also showed that about 22,600 beneficiaries, representing 33.5 per cent of the total, were first-time formal borrowers.

The relatively low share of women among beneficiaries has now become a focus of NCGC’s expansion strategy with the launch of GuaranteeHer, a specialised credit guarantee framework for female-led Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).

Unveiled during a hybrid stakeholder engagement in Lagos, the initiative is designed to unlock more than N100 billion in credit for women-owned businesses over five years.

The framework increases risk coverage for eligible lending portfolios to as much as 70 per cent, compared with the standard 60 per cent, with donor-backed first-loss capital and concessional financing also incorporated into the structure.

Participating financial institutions are expected to pass the benefits of the reduced lending risk to women borrowers through lower interest rates, reduced collateral requirements and longer repayment periods.

GuaranteeHer will begin with a 12-month pilot deploying between N5 billion and N10 billion through selected commercial and microfinance banks before a planned nationwide expansion.

Over the programme’s five-year lifecycle, NCGC targets more than 20,000 women-owned businesses and expects the intervention to support upwards of 150,000 direct and indirect jobs.

The Minister of Finance, Taiwo Oyedele, and Minister of Women Affairs, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, were among the federal officials who backed the initiative at its launch.

The Managing Director of NCGC, Dr Bonaventure Okhaimo, said the company’s first-year performance demonstrated the potential of credit guarantees to expand lending beyond businesses able to meet conventional collateral requirements.

The NCGC’s experience also reflects a shift in the scale of its guarantee operations. While 1,478 facility-level accounts were reported in June 2025, the number of end-borrowers rose to 67,512 by August 2026, largely following the introduction of portfolio guarantees that enable lenders to extend credit to larger pools of smaller borrowers.

The company said the N21.59 billion in risk cover had generated a 2.17-fold credit mobilisation ratio, providing the basis for the expansion of targeted guarantee programmes such as GuaranteeHer.