About Us

The Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA)the umbrella organization of employers in the Organised Private Sector of Nigeria, observed in the past five to seven years that there had been the tremendous increase in the number of micro and small enterprises compared with the medium and large businesses that constituted the bulk of NECA membership. It had equally observed that quite a significant number of the businesses were owned by women. Unfortunately, most of these micro and small businesses were not members of its Association.

As part of its quest to support small businesses, NECA developed a new strategic thrust to expand membership and ensure representativeness by attracting micro and small-scale businesses into the fold of the Association. A tailor-made support service was recognized as an entry strategy for the achievement of this objective. Hence, it sought the support of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise growth through facilitation, direct provision of selected demand-driven services and through advocacy aimed at creating a better business environment.

NECA had equality attained a phase in its evolution where it had realized the imperative to address the basic issues of promotion and support of gender-based economic development. This was the view of knowledge of ILO convention on gender equality.

NECA had seen this initiative as a veritable opportunity to broaden its membership base, and ensure more woman entrepreneurs are represented in its Governing Body.

In the year 2005, a cooperation project started which brought NECA’s Network of Entrepreneurial Woman (NNEW) into existence. The project was initiated with the objective of promoting and nurturing entrepreneurship among women in Nigeria.

NNEW was established as a business women’s network that provides its members with access of information on business and socio-economic matters, opportunities for capacity building through training and most importantly facilitating access to finance through business promoting organisations.

Mrs. Rosi Lovdal, the NHO’s initiating consultant, the women came together and the proposed association was officially named and branded on the 25th of November, 2005 as NECA’s Network of Entrepreneurial Women - NNEW. Led by the pioneer President, Mrs. Adenike Ogunlesi, the women chose the colour and logo of NNEW - a combination of the green tissue napkins and the yellow window curtains in her office.

With a lot of enthusiasm, they embarked on the journey through new and uncharted territories and established NNEW to support women entrepreneurs in Nigeria with training in different capacity building programmes and providing them with information crucial to their businesses. NNEW therefore, set out to promote and nurture entrepreneurship amongst women as well as provide a major platform for women entrepreneurs to focus on issues that are crucial to the thriving of their businesses.

The mission of NNEW is to encourage and empower women to embrace entrepreneurship and prosper in business for the general good of the society thereby building generations of successful women entrepreneurs. In engaging members of the Network, the executives realized that many of them experience financial difficulties in the course of running their businesses. The challenges ranged from the availability to the affordability of funding. In some cases, where funds were available through intervention schemes by development finance agencies, etc, the criteria for eligibility was far beyond the capacity of the majority of the women. Other sources such as the commercial banks and finance bureau were notorious for high-interest rates.

According to one of the initiating consultants, Mrs. Rosi Lovdal NNEW stood out as a network for women in Nigeria because its mandate gave it a framework to deal with real business challenges women face in practical terms.

The first “All Women Seminar” was organized on the 17th of November, 2005 with Rosi in attendance and issues discussed included:

• Building capacity and capability of women entrepreneurs to overcome hurdles of funding.
• Identifying the problems of operating SMEs and ways of solving them: adopt the right attitude at funding.
• Appreciating the need for product and process quality in achieving competitiveness within a globalized economy.

This was followed by another meeting in March 2006 where women were given the opportunity to network with one another in groups to discuss three major issues.

          Problems and challenges facing women entrepreneurs

Possible solutions

What the Network could do

The donor representative facilitated a participatory session that brought out the shared challenges faced by women entrepreneurs and their peculiar needs.