A Non-governmental Organisation (NGO), Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Economic Development Initiative (SEEDi) has urged the Federal Government to produce a Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) development plan in Nigeria.
The Lead Partner of SEEDi, Celestine Okeke, during the World MSMEs Day celebration stated that the plan would be of immense benefit to small businesses.
Reasons explained: Okeke stated that the challenges MSMEs face include unavailability of non-financial services, high cost of doing business, multiple taxation, stifling business ecosystem and reducing purchasing power of the average Nigerian.
He said the MSME development plan being advocated for should take into consideration, the peculiarities of doing business for small businesses across sectors of the Nigerian economy, the challenges small businesses face, and more importantly, how to surmount them.
Okeke added that the government should without delay, direct its Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs) saddled with the responsibilities of promoting small businesses to begin the process of producing an MSME development plan.
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“While we acknowledge and appreciate that small businesses need finance to sustain and or scale up their enterprises, we want to restate that the fundamentals of starting, sustaining and scaling up small business enterprises transcend beyond mere access to finance.
“As we mark the World MSMEs Day, it is our hope that the present administration will take more interest in supporting MSMEs to thrive by improving the ecosystem they operate in, enable them to better their enterprises and then, support them to access finance after mastering the act of business best practices,” he said.
The UN General Assembly declared the World MSMEs Day in recognition of the MSMEs in promoting innovation, creativity and decent work for all the achieving goals of 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
It is pertinent to note that if the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) Development Plan is drawn for MSME’s it will lead to growth and advancement in the MSME sector. This will in turn contribute to the economy in terms of output of goods and services as well as creation of jobs at relatively low capital cost.
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