From Walter Ukaegbu, Abuja
The Director General, Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency SMEDAN Olawale Fasanya yesterday disclosed that the agency is already implementing support system that can serve as the launch pad for Micro Small and Medium Enterprise Developments in the country.
Fasanya disclosed this during the press conference on commemoration of the world MSME Day in Abuja stating that the agency interventions essentially seek to address the challenges that border on capacity building, advocacy, access to finance/funds, technology, equipments, markets, raw materials, data and putting in place appropriate policy framework.
He noted that, the National policy on MSMEs, finance has been identified as one of the key priority areas knowing that SMEDAN has been involved in sustained advocacy visits to both private and public organization that are into funding with the hope of availing MSMEs easier access to usable loans.
According to him, “With the persistent funding challenges still experienced, the agency initiated some programs in the conditional grant scheme, (CGS) which seeks to cause a reduction in the size of the informal NANO and Micro Enterprise which the NBS report puts at over 38million.
“Part of the condition for accessing the grant is the willingness to become formal in operations. It involves capacity building, registration of the micro enterprise with the Corporate Affairs Commission CAC, provision of micro insurance, opening of bank accounts and provision of grants, (N50,000 each). There are over 75,000 beneficiaries of the CGS program across the states since it’s inception in 2017”.
To ensure even spread development across Nigeria and to explore and exploit idle resources the agency embarked on a variant of the Japanese one Village one product initiative and named it One local government one product, OLOP which is being executed in all the one hundred and nine 109 Senatorial district in the country.