Toriola who made the assertion during the recent Sparkle’s
webinar for SMEs themed, ‘Simplifying Support for Small Businesses’, shed light
on how digitization and smart use of data could help SMEs transform their
business and improve access to capital.
More than 95 per cent of registered businesses around the
world are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Africa is no different.
According to the World Bank, they provide for more than half of all jobs and
account for more than a third of the combined GDP of emerging market economies.
Getting access to credit, however, is an uphill task for most of these SMEs. It is now widely established that lack of access to finance is the most significant constraint on the growth of small enterprises. In developing economies, the estimated annual credit gap could be as much as $5.2trn.
Speaking on access to funding for SMEs at the Sparkle
webinar, Toriola urged SMEs to take advantage of the data presented to them
through telecommunication companies and financial systems as means to access
capital.
“Data is abundant in both the telecommunications and
financial ecosystems. The person that is going to make magic out of this is the
person that can turn data into wisdom because the data is out there and not
many people have successfully been able to transform and beneficially structure
this data. If we convert data into wisdom, then I think we can create a magic
formula that can transform the SME world and fix the problem about access to
capital,” Toriola said.
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