The Development Bank of Nigeria has disbursed a cumulative N1.4 trillion to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises through 84 Participating Financial Institutions nationwide, creating approximately 1.6 million jobs as at December 2025, Managing Director Tony Okpanachi disclosed this week. The announcement came alongside the launch of the bank’s new five-year strategy and two major new initiatives: DAWN, the DBN Action for Women in Nigeria programme, and the MSME Data Assets platform, a publicly accessible open data resource on Nigerian small businesses.
The scale of what has been deployed
The N1.4 trillion disbursement represents the cumulative output of DBN’s wholesale lending model, through which it channels funds to commercial banks, merchant banks, and microfinance institutions, which then on-lend to small businesses at the final mile. The 84 Participating Financial Institutions include a range of institution types, giving the model geographic and segment reach that DBN’s own balance sheet could not achieve through direct lending.
The 1.6 million jobs figure, while disclosed without a sectoral or state-level breakdown, reflects the employment-generating effect of MSME credit at scale. Small businesses in Nigeria account for approximately 87 per cent of total private sector employment, meaning that credit flowing into the MSME sector converts into jobs faster and more broadly distributed than equivalent capital deployed into large enterprises.
N1.4 trillion disbursed through 84 financial institutions is not an abstraction. It is the cumulative working capital, equipment financing, and business expansion credit that has kept hundreds of thousands of Nigerian small businesses operational through one of the most difficult economic periods the country has experienced in recent memory.
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The new five-year strategy
DBN’s incoming strategic framework sets a target of reaching more than two million MSMEs, a significant expansion from the current beneficiary base. The strategy includes deliberate targets for women-led businesses, youth-led enterprises, and businesses in underserved states, acknowledging that the distribution of development finance in Nigeria has historically been uneven and that closing geographic and demographic gaps in credit access requires explicit targets rather than general ambitions.
Okpanachi framed the shift in institutional focus clearly: the central question has moved from the reforms themselves to who benefits. That framing is important. DBN’s first phase established the infrastructure for wholesale MSME lending. The second phase is about ensuring that infrastructure reaches the businesses most consistently excluded from formal credit, which means proactive distribution, not just institutional availability.
DAWN and the women’s finance gap
The launch of DAWN, the DBN Action for Women in Nigeria, responds to data that has been consistent across multiple assessments of Nigeria’s financial landscape: women-owned businesses face structurally higher barriers to credit access despite demonstrating lower default rates when credit is extended. Moniepoint’s 2025 Impact Report confirmed that women borrowers on its platform defaulted 2.5 times less frequently than male borrowers, while FCMB’s SheVentures programme and the Wema Bank-EIB facility both used earmarked capital structures specifically because general SME programmes consistently under-serve women entrepreneurs.
DAWN is designed to change the structure of DBN’s lending pipeline to include women-led businesses in a more deliberate and measurable way, with the Participating Financial Institutions incentivised to develop products and distribution approaches that reach women business owners who currently fall outside conventional credit processes.
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The MSME Data Assets platform
Perhaps the most structurally significant announcement alongside the disbursement figures was the launch of MSME Data Assets, a publicly accessible open data resource on Nigerian small businesses. The absence of credible, accessible data on Nigeria’s MSME population has been one of the most persistent obstacles to effective policy design and commercial lending to the sector. Lenders who cannot independently verify the size, structure, or performance profile of the small business market have defaulted to conservative assumptions that translate into restrictive lending criteria.
An open data resource on Nigerian MSMEs is infrastructure for the entire ecosystem, not just for DBN. Every lender, investor, policymaker, and development institution that uses the data to make better decisions about Nigeria’s small business sector benefits from something DBN built but that the whole market can draw on.
