Small and medium enterprises are notably the engines that drive economic development but face numerous challenges in Nigeria, ranging from power outages, lack of capital, and poor management to inadequate information and corruption.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for almost 90 percent of businesses in both leading and developing economies through job creations, employment, tax provision and contribution to gross domestic product (GDP). This underlines their critical and positive role to nation-building.
Founder of Tribe of Oofy and Walletcubes, Patience Bamidele Amaebite, is introducing a series of learning, coaching, networking and wealth creation strategies to help Africa’s small and medium scale enterprises grow their businesses and experience financial stability.
Tribe of Oofy (Oofy, simply means wealth) is an online platform that helps bold and ambitious women with personal and enterprise development, branding, marketplace positioning and networking because women are unlimited architects to nation-building and economic development.
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Walletcubes is a financial services organisation focused on wealth creation strategy and management. Our services will include start-up loan, growth funding, personal financial management, saving schemes, crowdfunding, accounting and pricing services for SMEs.
No fads, no fluff and no hype. These are massive but critical elements to facilitate healthy growing businesses in Africa. Dele (as she is fondly called) believes that if small and medium scale enterprises get the appropriate support, they will evoke an economic boom and create various pathways to wealth and development in Africa.
Dele, obtained a bachelor of science in Accounting and masters of business administration from two Nigerian Universities, and a master’s of science in Global Human Resource Management from the University of Liverpool, in the United Kingdom.
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She brings her over 16years of corporate experience in finance, accounting, process and HR to the table. She also holds a certification in Brand Building, Customer Relations, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Business Strategist and Life Coaching. She’s all about helping individuals build a viable and long-lasting business.
“SMEs play a pivotal role as facilitative development through the provision of inputs and services for industries while at the same time providing direct goods and services to consumers; they are the propelling engines for sustainable growth and economic development in Africa,” Amaebite said.
To explain how this vision came about, she noted that SMEs are the pillar of growth in any economy and they are struggling to manage their businesses and often unable to take it to the next level. Seeing them struggle and fail is painful, this is not mere passion but a call to support individuals and businesses; especially SMES she concluded.
When SMES grow and scale their businesses, they fuel the engine for sustainable growth and economic development in Africa. Key challenges facing SMEs include inefficiency of African capital markets in supporting SMEs, low capacity and the need for upskilling and training, minimal visibility to a broad investor base, absence of government-led SME strategy to develop the ecosystem, inadequate funding, poor information management and record-keeping, Lack of knowledge in differentiating a business from personal capital, lack of infrastructural facilities, inadequate business and management skills.
The focus of ‘Tribe of Oofy’ and ‘Walletcubes’ is to provide services and products to help SMEs overcome some of these challenges because the importance of SMEs in an economy cannot be overestimated.
In fact, the world governments, policymakers whether in developed or developing countries now see SMEs as sources of employment, wealth creation and innovation.
She suggested that, if the government focuses and devotes time and resources to addressing SMEs’ challenges, it will indirectly create multiple channels for development through thousands of jobs creation which will boost the country’s economic development, boost overall growth and reduce poverty.
