The Bank of Industry has set aside ₦2 billion in loans for young Nigerian entrepreneurs, with lending rates ranging from 10 to 13 percent depending on loan size and type. BOI Project Officer Lawal Khaleel disclosed the figure at a stakeholders’ meeting in Kano on the Inclusive Economic Empowerment Project, a programme funded by the British Council and implemented by the Centre for Information Technology and Development, known as CITAD. Eligible entrepreneurs need to meet BOI’s standard criteria to access the funds, including registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission and clearing the bank’s due diligence process.
Khaleel used the meeting to address a concern he said comes up constantly among businesses in Kano and across Northern Nigeria specifically: interest rates themselves. In response, he confirmed BOI has obtained a licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria to begin offering non-interest banking, giving entrepreneurs who have avoided conventional lending on religious or financial grounds an actual alternative rather than being priced out of formal credit altogether. Khaleel was direct about how BOI sees its own role in this. The bank’s mandate, he said, is to industrialise the country, not to maximise profit, and the biggest obstacle facing businesses in the North remains lack of access to finance tied specifically to how interest itself is structured. He also flagged a more mundane but very real barrier: applicants routinely face bureaucratic bottlenecks trying to get through BOI’s own digital application process, and he encouraged CITAD to help young entrepreneurs prepare stronger business plans before approaching the bank directly.
The numbers behind why this matters in Kano specifically are stark. CITAD’s Isa Garba told the same meeting that between 42 and 55 percent of Nigerian youth nationally are unemployed or underemployed, with Kano recording a 29.4 percent youth unemployment rate and 32.06 percent underemployment. Garba also pointed to a roughly 67 percent gap between the skills Nigerian educational institutions actually produce and the skills employers and businesses say they need, calling for closer collaboration between government, financial institutions, businesses, and development organisations to close that mismatch. A director at the Kano Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture, Tijjani Sarki, backed up the finance concern directly, saying access to loans remains the single biggest challenge facing small-scale businesses in the region. Fifty successful applicants have already been selected through the IEE programme so far.
This isn’t BOI’s first specifically youth-targeted lending push, and knowing that history helps judge how seriously to take this one. Under Managing Director Olasupo Olusi, the bank has previously launched a ₦10 billion intervention fund aimed at women entrepreneurs, and in 2025 unveiled a separate ₦2 billion single-digit loan programme run jointly with Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps for corps members specifically, building on the bank’s older Graduate Entrepreneurship Fund, which since 2015 has trained more than 3,000 graduates, financed 609 start-ups, and disbursed over ₦1 billion in loans. BOI has also continued expanding its own capital base at the institutional level, securing SEC approval in August 2026 for a $1 billion Medium-Term Multi-Currency Instruments Programme, giving the bank considerably more room to keep layering targeted lending initiatives like this one on top of its core industrial financing mandate.
For Kano’s young entrepreneurs specifically, the real test isn’t the ₦2 billion figure itself, it’s whether the non-interest banking option and CITAD’s business-plan support actually translate into approved loans reaching people who’ve been avoiding formal lending altogether, rather than becoming one more well-funded programme that struggles with the same bureaucratic friction Khaleel himself acknowledged exists inside BOI’s own application process.
