Conscious that no economy can grow without thriving small and medium enterprises, the Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) of the Lagos Business School is championing a collaborative initiative with the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Fate Foundation, and Atco Realty to deepen entrepreneurship in Nigeria.
The desire is to help Nigeria create an ecosystem where start-ups, mostly small scale businesses, can scale their businesses. This collaboration is expected to affect policy direction towards changing the mindset on how businesses can scale.
Dikko Radda, DG of SMEDAN, said for Nigerian economy to be fully diversified, the small and medium enterprises must be fully empowered. According to Radda, the small business subsector of the Nigerian economy holds the key to Nigeria’s economic sustenance.
Radda opined that there were about 41.5million MSMEs in Nigeria as at 31 December 2017, while about 41.4 million of the MSMEs are micro enterprises. “Whatever we need to do; we need to help them, because that is the way we need to grow this economy,” said Radda, who was represented by Monday Ewans, director, enterprise development and promotion.
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To him, about 99.4 percent of businesses in Nigeria are micro enterprises and operate mostly in the informal sector of the economy, hence the need to help deepen the sector of the economy to scale and move from the informal to the formal sector.
Speaking further on MSMEs contribution to Nigerian economy, he stated that MSMEs employ about 59.6 million persons as at 31 December 2017, accounting for about 76.5 percent of Nigeria’s working population, thereby contributing about 49.8 percent to Nigeria’s nominal GDP, and 7.64 percent of Nigeria’s export figure. “With this statistics you will understand that MSMEs are very important,” said Radda, stating that SMEDAN’s sole objective is to grow the subsector of the economy.
Olawale Anifowose, MD, Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), Nigeria said the global entrepreneurship week was a celebration of innovation and creativity. According to him, the essence of celebrating the entrepreneurship week is to strengthen the light of entrepreneurship within the ecosystem in Nigeria.
Anifowose opined that GEN works to highlight and showcase the different strides of development in the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Nigeria, by celebrating entrepreneurs who have taken the bold steps of continuously growing the economy of Nigeria. “For us, the global entrepreneurship week is a big celebration,” said Anifowose.
Global entrepreneurship week is celebrated every 3rd week of November to celebrate entrepreneurs in the global ecosystem. However, the EDC has taken the lead in the last ten years to host the event, which has grown from an event celebrated in Lagos into 22 states of the federation.
Among other things, the global entrepreneurship week will engage young Nigerians through the ‘youth entrepreneurship dialogue’ that will expectedly get undergraduates converged on the Entrepreneurship Hub of the Yaba College of Technology, which was a joint initiative by SMEDAN and EDC, aimed at deepening entrepreneurship among students of Nigerian tertiary institutions.
