LAGOS, NIGERIA – A veteran journalist and former editor of BusinessDay Newspapers, Mr. Okwudili Ojukwu-Enendu, has been appointed head of SMEclub Editorial Board. SMEclub, Africa’s Business Toolkit, is an online interactive platform and resource centre for African small businesses.

As head of SMEclub Editorial Board, Mr. Enendu will lead other editors, who have graciously agreed to invest their time on voluntary basis, to ensure the editorial quality of articles submitted for publication on SMEclub.

Ojukwu-Enendu, trained as a journalist, graduating with a B.Sc honours degree in Mass Communication obtained from the University of Lagos. His fulltime journalism career started at The Financial Post in 1989. He has since worked on various newspapers and magazines.

SMEclub, a social investment initiative of Venture Vanguard Limited, was born in 2003 out of a burning passion to impact positively on the SME subsector of the African economy by creating a platform for small business owners and managers to:
-    access quality information for sound enterprise management
-    interact with their peers, sharing their challenges and benefiting from each other’s experiences.
-    enhance the efficacy of their business groups and associations by providing tools for more effective membership management, collaboration, funding, capacity building and policy advocacy

SMEclub also provides a great platform for African professionals at home and in diaspora to build their personal brand and showcase their competencies through “article marketing”. Professionals can build their profile on SMEclub and regularly submit articles on their areas of competence. Article marketing has proven to be the most cost-effective way to strengthen your brand and attract new clients. The service is absolutely free and can be accessed at www.smeclub.net.

Venture Vanguard Limited (VVL) was incorporated in 2004 to provide business support services to small- and medium-sized enterprises, particularly in the areas of strategic planning, finance, process & technology. VVL has worked on various SME and microfinance capacity building and access-to-finance projects with USAID, IFDC and EMPRETEC.

To further its mission of empowering African small businesses, VVL recently partnered Ladlas Prince, an international consulting firm based in the USA,  to assist companies with the arrangement of financing for their domestic and international commerce in emerging markets like Nigeria, while offering an array of enterprise development services to SMEs and MFIs using EDN/ATA facilities. MFIs can access EDN/ATA grants for banking software implementation, business process improvement and credit rating services. For more information, please visit www.venture.smeclub.net