Nasarawa State Investment and Development Agency NASIDA has trained over 200 Small and Medium Enterprises in nasarawa on climate-smart practices to mitigate the effect of climate change.
The Managing Director of the Agency Malam Ibrahim Abdullahi, announced this while declared open the two-day business support and sensitization workshop on climate-smart practices in lafia, the State Capita.
The Managing Director was represented by the Head of Infrastructure Finance and Team Lead Public Private Partnership PPP in the Agency, Mrs. Mayowa Edgar.
He said, the training engagement was to empower businesses with the necessary knowledge and tools to adopt climate-smart business practices that would enhance productivity at minimal cost.
Malam Ibrahim Abdullahi, explained that, the idea for the capacity-building workshop is in line with the development of a Climate Investment Platform CIP for Nasarawa State by NASIDA in collaboration with Murty International Limited through grant support from the African Climate Foundation.
” We are now bringing some of the ideas and learnings from our stakeholder’s engagement on CIP, fine-tuned by our experts, to show the business community things they can do practically to help their businesses to be more climate-friendly and even save cost in the long run,”
According to him, adopting climate-smart business practices had enormous benefits and opportunities for SMEs in the State and the country as a whole.
“If our businesses are more of climate-sustainable in their approaches, they will be able to unlock better financing in the long run.
“You can save cost in the immediate and unlock financing for your business in the long run because organizations are willing to support if your business can meet the criteria for green and sustainability in the business community,” he said.
Speaking earlier, The Project Consultant and Facilitator of the Workshop Dr Adnan Aminu, said Small and Medium Enterprises SMEs were targeted for the training as the building block of the economy, most of which were not aware of climate change and its impact on their businesses.
Dr. Adamu Aminu also said that most of the SMEs were ignorant of the benefits derivable from switching to their conventional ways of doing business to more climate-smart ways.
He said, the Team are here to inform the SMEs about the reality of climate change, to make them see it from their own perspective and how it affects their businesses.
“Our ultimate goals is to be able to shift some of them from the business-as-usual way of doing to more climate-smart way of doing businesses.
“Businesses here refers to stakeholders across all sectors – farmers, agro-processors, transport owners, energy used, and all those adding to issues of climate change in the state.
COV/Aliyu Muraki/Lafia
