By our staff reporter
Top tier financial firm, Awash Bank, receives one of the Global SME Finance Awards for the 2023 year.
This year’s Global SME Finance Awards 2023 which recognizes financial institutions and fintech companies for their outstanding achievements in delivering exceptional products and services to their SME clients was held in Mumbai, India last week in the presence of over 700 participants from more than 70 countries in person and virtually.
Organized by the SME Finance Forum, a forum managed by the IFC, the private sector wing of World Bank Group, and endorsed by the G20’s Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI), the Global SME Finance Awards had four categories and cross all categories, a record 165 applications were submitted from 120 different institutions, with 30 applications being identified by an independent, expert panel of 85 judges as winners.
Awash Bank was recognized by the SME Finance Forum with an Honorable Mention in the Best SME Financier category of the Global SME Finance Awards 2023 from Africa. The bank competed for the award with the COVID Recovery and Resilience Project (CRRP), a credit guarantee facility that has been implemented in collaboration with Mastercard Foundation and First Consult.
More than 7,800 MSMEs have benefited from the project with almost all of them being first-time borrowers with no prior credit history. A loan amounting to 702 million birr plus was disbursed on clean basis or against personal guarantees, of which more than 500 million birr has been repaid back thus far with the NPL ratio remaining at a single digit against the total amount granted. Over 40,000 jobs that could have been lost owing to the pandemic were sustained and/or created by this specific project, the bank disclosed.
The bank has been synonymous with unheard of guarantee fund projects in Ethiopia, which typically serve a handful of businesses as opposed to in the thousands.
The bank said that it has been selected from the most competitive pool of applicants ever, “Although much more needs to be done by Awash Bank in this arena.”
