SMEDAN DG seeks support for MSMEs market expansion for made-in-Nigeria products

THE Director-General of Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency (SMEDAN), Dr. Dikko Umaru Radda, has sought more proactive measures to give support to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in order to increase the productivity of made-in-Nigeria goods.

Speaking in Enugu at the lAunch of a support programme for MSMEs ‘SMEDAN Select’, Umaru Radda rated Nigeria low on support programmes for MSMEs.

He said government in both industrialised and developing countries provide a wide variety of programmes to assist MSMEs.

“Despite the success of MSME strategies in few countries, majority of developing countries have found that the impact of their SME development programmes on enterprise performance has been less than satisfactory.

“In view of this, there is the need to develop and deploy more specific approaches, hence the SMEDAN Select initiative,” he said.

The SMEDAN boss said the objectives of implementing SMEDAN Select are to increase “access to local, regional and global markets for MSMEs, to support market expansion for MSMEs, to support the creation of brand names for Made-in-Nigeria products as well as to increase awareness creation on standard Made-in-Nigeria products.”

Radda, represented by Director, Planning, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation, Wale Fasanya, said: “These products, numbering about 150, have been specially sought and selected across Nigeria and the products would be displayed and marketed on the SMEDAN website and other social media handles.

He added that the hardcopy catalogues, would also be distributed to Embassies, MDAs and departmental stores across major cities in Nigeria to improve the patronage of the products.

“MSMEs collectively account for a majority of the enterprises in Nigeria and also account for the highest number of jobs created in the economy,” he added.

He said recent national MSMEs survey of 2017 conducted by the agency in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that there are 41,543,028 MSMEs, employing 59,647,954 (76.5% of labour force) and contributing 49.78% and 7.64% to nominal GDP and exports respectively.

Radda said this staggering statistics cannot be ignored in any serious economy, adding that properly harnessing of MSMEs can trigger an entrepreneurial revolution in industrialisation, agriculture and commerce in Nigeria towards creating the platform for job creation, wealth creation, poverty alleviation and food security.

The director-general, however, encouraged Nigerians to patronise all products profiled as a way of supporting the MSMEs to achieve their collective goal of instituting the MSMEs sub-sector of their dream that would contribute significantly to job creation, wealth creation and poverty alleviation.

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