The newly appointed Director-General of the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Mr. Olawale Fasanya has promised to introduce a special intervention scheme to empower the operations of nano and micro enterprises that form up to 32 million of the nation’s businesses.
Fasanya said that the intervention code-named “Conditional Grant Scheme” essentially seeks to formalise some of the Nano/Micro enterprises that have growth potential. The package includes tailored capacity building, provision of grants and establishing relationships with the formal banking sector and other critical compliance institutions. He said that the 2022 target is 10,000 beneficiaries that will be spread across 9 States of the Federation.
According to the Director-General, “the last report of the SMEDAN/NBS National Survey of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) put the total number of enterprises in the sub-sector at well over 39 million providing a total of over 61 million employments and about 49% of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Nigeria. As important as the sub-sector is to the national economy, it is still encumbered with several challenges which the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing Ukraine-Russia have further worsened. This will further be enhanced with the special”
He said that this will be further enhanced with the special “One-Local Government One Product (OLOP)” scheme which seeks to develop enterprises in rural communities in line with the available resources for wealth creation through tailored enterprise management development skills and access to incremental technology. The target for this year is to assist 214 Cooperatives in 214 LGAs across 29 States of the Federation.
Towards this end, SMEDAN will look at each of the respective local government’s area of strength and work with various associations and co-operatives to provide efficient machinery and working tools that each group member can access and benefit from while only contributing a stipend to the running and maintenance cost of the equipment.
