FirstBank has announced its support for the Imo State Government’s One Kindred One Business Initiative, known as ÓKÓBÌ, a programme that formalises community groups into registered businesses as a strategy for expanding financial inclusion and reducing poverty in both rural and urban settings across the state.
ÓKÓBÌ was conceived by Governor Hope Uzodimma and draws deliberately on traditional African values of communalism and collective responsibility, converting existing social networks into structured economic units that are more fundable, more accountable, and more resilient than individual informal enterprises. Since its launch in 2023, the programme has registered over 600 businesses with approximately 20,000 members. Its three-year target is the creation or support of 100,000 jobs.
FirstBank Group CEO Olusegun Alebiosu framed the bank’s participation around the concept of peer accountability, describing it as a powerful and underutilised driver of enterprise growth. His argument is practical: groups that hold each other responsible for outcomes tend to perform better than isolated borrowers, and ÓKÓBÌ’s structure formalises that dynamic in a way that makes the businesses bankable. The initiative, he said, transforms existing social capital into tangible economic value rather than attempting to build financial behaviour from scratch.
The model addresses one of the persistent failures of SME financing in Nigeria. Individual small business owners, particularly in rural and semi-urban areas, often lack the collateral, documentation, and credit history required to access formal financing. Collective registration changes that calculus. A group enterprise with shared ownership, registered status, and mutual accountability presents a different risk profile to a lender than a sole trader operating informally. FirstBank’s involvement signals that the structure is credible enough to attract institutional capital.
Imo State’s Chief Economic Adviser, Professor Kenneth Amaeshi, described ÓKÓBÌ as a viable response to unemployment and informality, and called on other corporate organisations to adopt the model. That appeal is worth taking seriously. A programme that has enrolled 20,000 members across 600 businesses in two years, without the scale of resources available to a federal initiative, suggests the model has traction beyond its political origins.
The partnership between a major commercial bank and a state government programme built on communal economics is not a combination that appears often in Nigeria’s development landscape. Whether ÓKÓBÌ delivers on its 100,000-job target will depend on factors beyond the launch of a banking partnership. But the underlying logic, that communities already organised around kinship and trust are better economic units than isolated individuals, is grounded in evidence and worth watching at scale.
