The Financing Challenge - Part 5: Financing Options for SMEs

This week we close this 5-part series on ‘Financing Challenge’ for small, medium, and new businesses as we continue to see initiatives from both governments and private sector to provide financing and other enabling mechanisms for this segment of our African economies. Though there is still a very long way to go, the steps taken so far are all in the right direction.

To close then, we will highlight the need for entrepreneurs to, as much as possible, bootstrap before going out to get other people’s money as this is also a show of their strong conviction in the potential of their business idea. Financial awareness and literacy are key elements they should work on improving upon, without necessarily trying to be experts. And most of all, they should be obsessed with generating as much cash as possible and find ways of keeping this cash within the business for as long as monthly and annual cash positions are still negative. Cash is always better than profit.

To bring a more expert perspective to this, I have uploaded this presentation by an amazing Professional, Sam Nwanze, the Chief Investment Officer at Heirs Holdings https://fr.slideshare.net/BrainAzemchap/understanding-access-to-finance-teep-bootcampsamnwanze-56191993 Sam presented at the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme (TEEP) boot camp in Lagos last July. I remember he was the only presenter who was flooded by delegates trying to get his presentation after he got off stage. He spoke in so simple terms that the 1,000 African entrepreneurs gathered in the room could easily understand on a topic like Financing.

You can watch part of Sam’s presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uwwfaXh5J0

Another good read is https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/1733-small-business-financing-options-.html.

“There are not enough mature projects to invest in” Investors say; “we cannot get financing for our projects” SMEs and startups say. In between, there is need for a middle ground so that this segment continues to drive our Africa’s economic growth into the very long term.

In our next post in two weeks, we will be looking at “choosing the right business”, now that we have talked through some of the very guiding basics the entrepreneurs should always be aware of as they strive to realize the “Small will always be Big” dream in Africa.

Please, come back next week!