The Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) is tackling challenges limiting the growth and contribution of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), especially those with operations in the Northern part of the country.
Tony Okpanachi, managing director/CEO, DBN said on Thursday that the bank was concerned about those challenges, as there was still much to be done to boost the growth of MSMEs in the country, even though some achievements have been made. According to him, some of the challenges faced include access to finance, value chains, and markets.
Okpanachi was speaking at the 2nd regional DBN MSME summit in the northwest geopolitical zone of the country, aimed at understanding the problems faced by entrepreneurs within Kano and the northern region, to effectively provide solutions to the identified challenges.
The DBN regional MSME summit was conceptualised as part of a stakeholder engagement to create awareness around the bank’s mandate of providing access to finance for MSMEs and small corporate enterprises in Nigeria through the provision of financing and partial credit guarantees to eligible financial intermediaries on a market-conforming and fully financially sustainable basis.
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The DBN held the last summit in Maiduguri, Borno State before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and according to Okpanachi “so much has changed.”
“The conversations here will inspire and empower the MSMEs to deploy innovation, strategy, and creativity to sustainably address these challenges and thereby build enterprises that create exponential value and contribute to Nigeria’s socio-economic development,” Okpanachi noted in his address.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), SMEs in Nigeria have contributed about 48 percent of the national gross domestic product in the last five years. With a total number of about 17.4 million, they account for about 50 percent of industrial jobs and nearly 90 percent of the manufacturing sector.
Though significant growth has been achieved in the MSME sector, there is still much to be done. A PwC report in 2020 identified obtaining finance, finding customers, and infrastructure deficits as the most pressing problems of MSMEs in Nigeria.
Okpanachi noted that Kano plays a major economic role in the northern business terrain and the challenges that MSMEs there have to contend with are not different from those faced internationally.
The Kano summit was, therefore, to galvanise key stakeholders in the MSME ecosystem within the region to take advantage of the DBN platform to scale their businesses.
“This year, we are in Kano, the commercial capital of Northern Nigeria, and will be discussing the theme ‘The role of Development Banks in inclusive financing’, which speaks directly to DBN’s commitment, as a financial institution, towards providing a conducive environment for MSMEs to thrive.
The event also aimed to upskill business owners with knowledge on how to access reliable financing and how they can efficiently utilise these funds to upscale their businesses.
