By Felix Khanoba
The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDA) says it will support the nation’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in a practical way through its SELECT initiative.
The initiative is designed towards creating brands from standard products amongst the best Made in Nigeria products in the food, fashion, beauty and goods sectors.
The Director General of the agency, Dr. Dikko Umaru Radda,
stated this at the launch of the SMEDAN SELECT Document held in Enugu on Monday.
The Director General, who was represented by Wale Fasanya, Director, Planning, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation of the Agency 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 in departmental stores across major cities in Nigeria to improve the patronage of these products.
The Director General noted that MSMEs sub-sector is a very important sub-sector in the Nigerian economy. “They collectively account for a majority of the enterprises in Nigeria and also account for the highest number of jobs created in the economy”
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.
Dr.Radda said this staggering statistics cannot be ignored in any serious economy, adding properly harnessed, MSMEs can trigger an entrepreneurial revolution in Industrialization, Agriculture and Commerce in Nigeria towards creating the platform for job creation, wealth creation, poverty alleviation and food security.
Radda further said the globalisation process for MSMEs can be realized through any of a range of cross border activities, including trade, international investment, and participation in strategic alliances, partnerships and networking arrangements.
He said governments in both industrialized and developing countries provide a wide variety of programmes to assist micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). Despite the success of MSME strategies in a few countries, he said majority of developing countries have found that the impact of their SME development programs on enterprise performance has been less than satisfactory. As such there is the need to develop and deploy more specific approaches, hence the SMEDAN SELECT initiative.
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.
He however encouraged Nigerians to patronize all the products profiled as a way of supporting the MSMEs to achieve their collective goal of instituting the MSMEs sub-sector of our dream that would contribute significantly to job creation, wealth creation and poverty alleviation.
