First National Bank launches ASPIRE to fight COVID-19 in Ghana
First National Bank Ghana has launched an Accelerated Support for Pandemic Intervention and Relief Effort (ASPIRE) in Ghana to assist the government and stakeholders in mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
ASPIRE is a rapid response fund to address the critical and immediate health care needs in Ghana.
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At the virtual launch, the Chief Executive Officer of First National Bank, Mr Richard Hudson, said ASPIRE would help increase COVID-19 critical tracing and testing capacity, with focus on supporting local medical innovators and entrepreneurs.
“Through ASPIRE, we are collaborating with these proven local innovators to provide the needed apparatus for testing availability, ventilators and front-line protective cover,” he stated.
He said the initiative was Ghana’s version of the special initiative rolled out by First National Bank’s parent company, the FirstRand Group in South Africa – SPIRE (South African Pandemic Intervention and Relief Effort).
With the GH¢200,000 ASPIRE anchor funding, he said the bank would procure test kits with support from the FirstRand Group for delivery to primary treatment centres.
He said the fund would also support the set up of a six-month insurance package for selected staff at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research and fund the production of home-made hand-washing machines and ventilators.
Beginning
The Head of Marketing and Corporate Affairs at First National Bank, Ms Delali Dzidzienyo, said that was just the beginning of what the bank would do to help combat the impact of COVID-19.
“Supporting the healthcare system is where it matters most and the ASPIRE fund has been launched to help curtail the spread of the pandemic across the country,” she stated.
Before the launch of ASPIRE, she said the bank had launched relief packages to help both individual and corporate customers against the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the #RealHelp initiative, the bank offered at least a two-per-cent interest rate cut on loans to all existing customers from April 1, 2020 for the tenor of all cedi-denominated loan facilities.
Customers have also been given an option to apply for repayment holidays, where a temporary moratorium would be placed on the loan repayments for up to six months.
Ms Dzidzienyo said those initiatives aimed to give customers some leeway to reorganise their finances which may have been negatively affected by the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.