By Kingsley Okoh
Abuja – The National Enterprise Development Programme (NEDEP) has said the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) will create comparative advantage to revitalise the rural economy and entrench the industrialisation of rural areas to promote competitive trade and Investment.
This, it noted, would be done through the establishment of sustainable MSMEs in the 774 local government areas to increase export potentials and facilitate the integration of Small and Medium Enterprises(SMEs) into the commercial value chain to increase contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
It further said through this development, there will be improved sustainability plan in entrepreneurship and business development training which had been implemented under the One Local Government One Product(OLOP) platform while the access to finance components is being handled by the Bank of Industry (BOI) and the Skill acquisition by the Industrial Training Fund (ITF).
NEDEP hinted that SMEs represented one of the most important sectors of the economy which contributes 75% of the national employment and represents 96% of the businesses in Nigeria adding that with over 17.2million SMEs in Nigeria, 17million of them are micro enterprises in nature.
This implies that the growth in the SME sector is directly correlated with the growth in the economy as a whole and in the levels of employment in the Nigerian economy.
It said a well nurtured and structured MSMEs sub-sector will contribute significantly to employment generation, wealth creation, poverty reduction and sustainable economic growth and development in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, SMEDAN and National Bureau of Statistics reported that 73.24% of the topmost priority of assistance needed by the SME operators is finance but lamented that only 4.2% of 17.2million SMEs have been able to access loans or overdrafts from financial institutions while new entrants and start-ups find it practically impossible to access funds from banks.
NEDEP, which is being coordinated by SMEDAN, is guided by the empirical experiences of successful similar enterprise Development in Africa and Asia and the OLOP Pilot projects in Kano and Niger states.
While addressing some of the prominent challenges of the SME, NEDEP posited that some of the challenges of the micro, small and medium enterprises bothers on issues of finance.
It said a vast number of SMEs have low access to affordable finance, poor access to business development services and inadequate infrastructure and high cost of doing business.
