The Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Economic Development Initiative (SEEDi) has called on the Federal Government to create an MSME development plan to drive economic growth.
The organisation made the call in commemoration of the 2019 world’s MSME day.
SEEDi noted that small businesses are faced with a myriad of challenges beyond access to finance and that the establishment of a development plan for MSMEs will help address issues of unavailability of non-financial services, high cost of doing business and multiple taxation among others.
“We call on President Muhammadu Buhari to, without delay, task the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency (SMEDAN), the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Development Finance Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria (DFD-CBN), the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment (FMITI) and the Bank of Industry (BOI) to begin the process of producing an MSME development plan in Nigeria,” Celestine Okeke, lead partner, SEEDi, said.
Okeke said that the MSMEs development plan being advocated should take into consideration the peculiarities of doing business for small business operators in each sector of the Nigerian economy, the challenges peculiar to each sector and, more importantly, how the challenges are to be surmounted.
“While we acknowledge and appreciate that small businesses need finance to sustain and or scale up their enterprises, we want to restate that the fundamentals of starting, sustaining and scaling up small business enterprises transcend beyond mere access to finance. This fact came into the fore more prominently with our experience as a country with the YOUWIN award winners,” he said.
“As we mark the 2019 MSMEs day, it is our hope that the present administration will take more interest in supporting them to thrive by improving the ecosystem in which they operate,” he said.
Josephine Okojie
