The high growth impact, excellent satisfaction and tremendous inspiration offered by U&I Palm Enterprises has not gone unnoticed as the company emerged top among the awardees of the season 6 of the Building Entrepreneurs Today BET6 programme, an initiative of Diamond Bank aimed at encouraging highly prospective businesses to scale and expand employment opportunities to Nigerian youths while improving Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The award came after some rigorous screening and training exercises undertaken by the Pan-Atlantic University’s Enterprise Development Centre (EDC). Of the over 2,000 businesses that applied for the award, U&I Palm Enterprises emerged as one of the top 50 businesses to progress to the next round based on public votes. The second round involved rigorous training, mentoring and presentation exercises after which the top 15 entrepreneurs progressed to the last round.
The final round of selection where the awardees were eventually selected involved a pitch before very seasoned mentors, successful entrepreneurs and technical experts in enterprise development from the EDC. This round saw U&I Palm Enterprises emerge winner of the award.
At the award ceremony organized in Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria the company CEO and founder, Imaobong Ekanem described the journey as very rewarding though tasking. She mentioned that the knowledge and experience gathered in the course of the programme was quite rich and very likely to impacting tremendously on the outcome of her business activities going forward.
While commending Diamond Bank for the programme which according to her had raised the bar on entrepreneurship support in Nigeria, Imaobong encouraged other entrepreneurs to consider participating in future editions in order to acquire the skills necessary to grow their businesses. She also appealed to other corporate organizations as well as philanthropists to extend similar support to entrepreneurs in Nigeria, as this would tremendously reduce unemployment and poverty in the country.
The award attracted N3 million in grants for the company in addition to tremendous business support services from specialized Business Development Service Providers.