The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) has unveiled plans to establish Business Information Centres in all the 774 Local Government Areas (LGAs) as part of its sustained drive to further positively impact on small and medium enterprises’ operations nationwide
The agency’s Director General, Mr. Olawale Fasanya, gave this hint on Thursday at a stakeholders’ dialogue on the implementation of the National Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (NSMEs) Policy in Jos, Plateau State
He explained that the initiative would enable small scale business owners; particularly those in the rural communities to have access to information about the agency’s activities and how they could benefit from its capacity building offerings.
The Director General said: ”We have a lot of programmes; there are huge funds for people to access but the problem is lack of access to the right information.
”So, part of the strategy we want to use to solve this problem is to have business information centres across all the LGAs. We cannot be everywhere, but we will work with states and LGAs to see how we can deepen our reach.
”Most of our programmes are directed at the grassroots people, because our current survey shows that out of the 39.6 million MSMEs that we have in Nigeria, 96.7 percent of them are in the informal sector.
”Majority of Nigerians are in that class, and we cannot afford to neglect them. Currently, we are giving conditional cash transfer to people at the bottom of pyramid, but lack of adequate information has been a serious issue”, Fasanya added.
Speaking on why the agency organized the stakeholders’ forum, the SMEDAN boss said that it was aimed at getting feedback and suggestions from stakeholders at the state levels, with a view to improving on the agency’s intervention.
According to him, the agency’s management does not want to assume that it knows it all, especially with the rapidly changing developments in the global economic space as they relate to the real sector
He pointed out that the interaction with the small business owners and stakeholders would help the agency to feel existing gaps and resolve some of the challenges confronting the MSMEs.
