Climate change: Nasarawa trains 200 SMEs on climate-smart practices

By Tom Okpe

Nasarawa State Investment and Development Agency, NASIDA, is training 200 Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs in the State on climate-smart practices, to mitigate the effect of climate change.

Managing Director, NASIDA, Ibrahim Abdullahi, while declaring open the two-day business support and sensitisation workshop on climate-smart practices on Thursday in Lafia, said the engagement was to empower businesses with necessary knowledge and tools to adopt climate-smart business practices that would enhance productivity at minimal cost.

Represented by Mrs Mayowa Edgar, Head, Infrastructure Finance and Team Lead, Public Private Partnership, PPP, in the Agency, Abdullahi said this will also, bring up idea, for capacity building workshop, in line with development of a Climate Investment Platform, CIP, for Nasarawa State, by NASIDA in collaboration with Murty International limited, through a grant support from African Climate Foundation.

He said: “We are now bringing some of the ideas and learnings from our stakeholders 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.”

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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 there are organisations willing to support, if your business is able to meet the criteria for green and sustainability in the business community,” he stressed.

Also speaking, Dr Adnan Aminu, Project Consultant and facilitator of the workshop, said that SMEs were targeted for 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 most of the SMEs were ignorant of the benefits derivable from switching from their conventional ways of doing business to more climate-smart ways.

“Our ultimate target is to be able to shift some of them from the business-as-usual way of doing it, to more climate-smart way of doing businesses.

“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.

“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.

“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.

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