Climate change: 200 SMEs in Nasarawa train on climate-smart practices

By Monday Ajegena, Lafia

Nasarawa State Investment and Development Agency (NASIDA), has trained no fewer than 200 Small and Medium Enterprises in Nasarawa State on climate-smart practices to mitigate the effect of climate change.

Mr. Ibrahim Abdullahi, Managing Director of NASIDA, declared open the two-day business support and sensitization workshop on climate-smart practices on Thursday in Lafia.

The managing director was represented by Mrs. Mayowa Edgar, Head of Infrastructure Finance and Team Lead Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the agency.

He said that the engagement was to empower businesses with the necessary knowledge and tools to adopt climate-smart business practices that would enhance productivity at minimal cost.

According to Abdullahi, 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,” he said.

He maintained that adopting climate-smart business practices had enormous benefits and opportunities for SMEs.

“We know that if our businesses are more 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.

Also speaking, Dr Adnan Aminu, Project Consultant and facilitator of the workshop, said that 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.

Aminu also said that most of the SMEs were ignorant of the benefits derivable from switching from their conventional ways of doing business to more climate-smart ways.

“We 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 target 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.

“We want the people to know that there are benefits in switching to more climate-smart practices: environmental and, on many occasions, financial benefits.

“For instance, our agreement with Nasarawa State is that we will push for climate financing to come to these businesses as additional sources of income for them,” he said. (www.krestnews.com).