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La Finance pour ELLE (Fin’Elle), a subsidiary of Compagnie Financiere Africaine (COFINA) Group, a financial services group founded by Ivorian multimillionaire Jean-Luc Konan, has secured a €5-million ($5.6 million) loan from the Dutch development bank, FMO.
The financing will be executed under its MASSIF Fund, which focuses on small businesses and micro-entrepreneurs, women and youth entrepreneurs.
Fin’Elle is an operating subsidiary of COFINA Group and a micro-finance institution dedicated to supporting female entrepreneurship in Cote d’Ivoire. It offers adapted and accessible financial services to support financing for women.
The $5.6-million loan facility falls under a new partnership that will strengthen the company’s position in small-scale lending as it moves to facilitate access to credit for entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises in the agricultural value chain.
The loan facility will help Fin’Elle improve poor financing in Francophone Africa, as it moves to eliminate the barriers that women face in terms of accessing financial services. This falls in line with the company’s commitment to boost the volume and number of loans allocated to women.
Jeroen Harteveld, FMO MASSIF portfolio manager, said the partnership shows that FMO considers Cofina Group to be a privileged regional partner as it aims to strengthen its presence in Francophone Africa.
“We are proud that FMO, through its MASSIF Fund, supports Fin’Elle in its ambitions to increase access to finance for women entrepreneurs and SMEs run by women in Cote d’Ivoire, as this aligns strongly with our own mandate,” he said.
Based in Abidjan, COFINA Group was founded by Jean-Luc Konan in 2014 and is the leading micro-finance and transactional financial services institution in West and Central Africa.
Since it was established in 2014, COFINA Group has expanded its operations to Senegal, Guinea Conakry, Gabon, Mali, Congo-Brazzaville, Burkina Faso and Togo.
Under Konan, the group’s assets in 2020 reached €400 million ($453.3 million), an increase of 30.5-percent compared to the prior year’s figures, while its net banking income grew to €37 million ($42 million).
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