Equity Bank Holding: “With Proparco, we share a common vision in terms of culture and values”

How Equity Group supports SMEs in Kenya and in other countries in the region?

Equity Group realizes finance alone is not enough. It has supported insurance, banking, brokerage, investment banking services, with a technology platform provided within the Group. More importantly, with a foundation that helps to add on what financial services can’t. Building capacity in SMEs ; bringing and de-risking low-income families and individuals, so that they can consume our services. We do this by partnering with the development partners, partnering with foundations and NGOs, so that we can mainstream that by using the infrastructure of their group, so that we can have scale and sustainability.

What has been the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on SMEs?

The biggest impact we saw was the freeze in liquidity and capital as businesses tried to preserve themselves. But prolonged lockdowns meant that households started consuming their liquidity that was in business, because they had been kicked out of business. We realized that capital started to get eroded by their losses because they lost income but retained costs because most of the costs are fixed. That has been a huge challenge. We saw the community becoming desperate with the uncertainty. We have seen psychosocial challenges within society. We have seen desperation, particularly in terms of need: healthcare and food.

We devoted 17 million dollars to a community response to Covid-19. We took 68 public hospitals and committed to provide them together with a Covid-19 fund: PPEs for a period of 18 months. I’m glad that we have maintained that from March to date and we still have resources able to take us through.

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Video: Dr James Mwangi’s interview, CEO of Equity Bank Holding.

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Proparco just granted a US$100 million loan to Equity Bank to support Kenyan SMEs. How will this agreement further support Equity Group’s work?

We’ve been pleasantly surprised with our experience with Proparco and AFD. The promptness with which they responded to our request for a 100 million dollar facility to enable us to cushion ourselves from the massive loan rescheduling that we did, so that we could not be with impaired liquidity. It was very impressive. We realized that it was done in a very timely manner with speed and we’ve a lot of respect for the purpose for which it was applied. Incidentally, as we discussed, we realized how much Proparco has adopted the French Government’s policy of Choose Africa, which it is really promoting. We saw alignment of interests. But it’s my meeting with the management and staff of Proparco that brought it home how much we share in terms of culture and values.

To read : AFD Group grants a 100 million dollar loan to Equity Bank