In celebration of the 2022 International Women’s Day, Google has announced plans to commit $1 million in charitable funding to support programs helping women entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

This is part of a series of new initiatives aimed at supporting women-owned businesses.

According to Mojolaoluwa Aderemi-Makinde, Head Brand and Reputation at Google Africa, data shows that 58 percent of small and medium-sized business (SMB) entrepreneurs in Africa are women, yet, women-run businesses on average have 34 percent lower profits than those run by their male counterparts.

Furthermore, Google has also announced its #LookMeUp initiative, a campaign to showcase women entrepreneurs and tell their stories.

These stories feature women like Vivian Nwakah in Nigeria, who launched Medsaf, a pharma supply chain solution to help Nigerians get access to quality pharmaceutical health care services; Mary Mwange, CEO and founder of Data Integrated who is driving innovation in the mobile payments sector in Nairobi, Kenya, and Mosa Mkhize in South Africa, who launched Origins Publishers to provide children with books in their home languages.

Nigeria lost over $2bn to crude oil theft and vandalism in 2020, prompting the federal government’s revenue from the oil and gas industry to plunge by 40 per cent, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative has said.

NEITI disclosed this in its latest oil and gas industry report made public by its executive secretary, Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, in Abuja on Monday.

The report revealed that Nigeria earned $20.43 billion from the oil and gas sector in 2020, representing a decline of 40 percent compared to the 34.22 billion realised from the sector in 2019.

On remittances to the federation account from the sector, NEITI disclosed that $14.65 billion, representing 71.17 percent of the total earnings in 2020, was remitted to the account, while total aggregate financial flows from the sector to government in 10 years (2011-2020) was $394.029 billion.

Airlines operating in Nigeria are now forced to make immediate payments for aviation fuel as the lingering scarcity of the commodity has triggered a rash of flight delays and cancellations in recent days.

Correspondents gathered that before the scarcity of the fuel, airlines usually paid marketers two or three days after the supply of the commodity.

Findings show that despite the high cost of aviation fuel, airlines had since Tuesday adopted what was described as a ‘pay as you go’ strategy as marketers were unwilling to sell to them on credit.

Airlines have, however, described the new measure as sustainable.

Kingsley Ezenwa, spokesperson for Dana Air, told BusinessDay that marketers insisted that amid the high cost of the product, cash must be paid before supply of the product would be made.

According to him, airlines that have been able to meet this demand are getting a steady fuel supply.

Nigeria’s pension assets under management (AUM) grew by 30 percent year-on-year to N13.6 trillion at the end of January 2022.

The assets increased by one percent month-on-month, according to the National Pension Commission (PenCom) portfolio report.

PenCom said the number of registered savings accounts (RSA) holders grew by 625,000 to 9.6 million at the end of January.

Analysts at FBNQuest said FGN debt securities accounted for 61.3 percent of the pension assets, down from 71 percent as at January 2020.

However, when added with corporate and state government issuance, fixed-income exposure was equivalent to 70 percent of the industry’s AUM, down from almost 79 percent in the year-earlier period.