National Development Bank PLC (NDB) recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Women’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce (WCIC), under the NDB Jayagamu Sri Lanka scheme, as a means to provide support towards female entrepreneurs, especially those attached to the WCIC.

As a timely solution to boost the local economy and to financially stabilise the nation as a whole amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, NDB launched NDB Jayagamu Sri Lanka as a platform to lend support to small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs), emerging exporters, aspiring entrepreneurs and enthusiastic innovators of Sri Lanka. With this latest development, the bank will offer a number of benefits to the members of the WCIC such as low interest rate loans, a rebate of 25 percent when granting credit facilities as well as guidance and non-financial services in the form of workshops and webinars.

Since the launch of NDB Jayagamu Sri Lanka, the bank has been working with all its partner organisations such as the Export Development Board (EDB), Cord 360, Maersk (Pvt.) Ltd, Codevus (Pvt.) Limited - ERP service provider, Thinkcube Solutions (Pvt.) Ltd - ERP service provider and SL @ 100, in order to provide a boost to the country’s exporters and innovators in order to assist the country in post-COVID revival. Through this, both financial and non-financial services were offered to encourage and facilitate entrepreneurs, exporters and innovators even amidst the first and second waves of the pandemic.

Further, the bank has always been at the forefront of assisting entrepreneurs while also helping women in particular to achieve greater heights and successfully overcome traditional norms and barriers. The immense contributions made by women to the economy of the country and to other domains go largely unrecognised. It is mainly to address this shortcoming as well as to encourage more and more women to come forward in economic and social activity that NDB Bank introduced this endeavour under its ‘Araliya’ banking on women initiative. Sri Lanka Vanithabhimana is part of this initiative. The Sri Lanka Vanithabhimana provincial competition jointly presented by Sirasa Newsfirst and NDB Bank, was conducted to recognise female achievers across the chosen fields across the country.