The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), under its Youth Entrepreneurship Development Programme (YEDP), has given N774 million worth of cheques to 310 first batch beneficiaries of the programme. The beneficiaries, who were young graduates and mostly youth corps members, were presented the cheques in Abuja. Some of them got the maximum amount of N3 million.
The YEDP is N3bn youth entrepreneurship loan scheme accessed at single digit interest, launched by CBN on March 15, 2016, in partnership with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and Heritage Bank Ltd. Other applicants were at different stages of completing their loan documentation process.
The scheme aimed to inspire and harvest the entrepreneurial abilities of Nigerian youths to create over 1 million direct jobs by 2020. Speaking at the ceremony, the CBN Governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele, said to overcome the bottleneck of collateral requirements for loan access and ease access to finance, the beneficiaries academic and NYSC certificates, third party guarantor and movable assets were acceptable collateral under the Programme.
