The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) has urged Federal Government to adopt it’s One Local Government, One Product (OLOP) and Conditional Grant Scheme (CGS) models as national emergency programmes.
Dr Umaru Dikko, Director-General of SMEDAN, in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), in Abuja on Thursday said that the two programmes, if adopted, would promote rural industrialization, address unemployment, poverty, and insecurity in the country.
NAN reports that these programmes are targeted at providing finance, workspace, capacity building, working capital equipment, micro insurance, formalization, and business development service to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) operators.
Dikko said that OLOP, as one of its flagship programme was aimed at utilizing local raw materials to provide a cluster formation, machinery needed to escalate businesses and capital to increase the level of production.
“When we have clusters of people who have common facilities and do common things, it will help to develop and scale up production, increase package, quantity and quality to compete globally.
This, he said was necessary especially now that Nigeria has signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement to encourage standardized products and prevent Nigeria from being a dumping ground for other African nations.
He further said that SMEDAN also introduced the CGS which is aimed at boosting formalization of MSMEs by providing entrepreneurship training, one-year micro-insurance, and registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC).
The Director-General noted that the scheme is also aimed at assisting the MSMEs in opening a bank account, providing a token of N50,000 to improve business and add one person into the business to increase the number of people in employment sector of the economy.
“We have a very large informal sector in Nigeria, the MSMEs constitutes 41 million.
“We must ensure that the informal sector of the micro-businesses is formalized because the chances of growth and development for MSMEs operators, who are not formalized is very low.
“So we need to comply with global happenings to boost formalization,” he said.
According to him, the two programmes are in line with President Muhammadu Buhari’s second tenure agenda, to create millions of jobs in Nigeria and move millions of people out of poverty.
He advised all the agencies to work towards the realization of the president’s agenda by ensuring that a lot of people are moved out of poverty.
Dikko added that to succeed in doing that, there should be a coordinated approach to MSMEs development in Nigeria because a lot of agencies were into MSMEs development but lacked serious coordination.
He further said that SMEDAN, being an agency of government responsible for MSMEs development was an apex organization in charge of MSMEs development in the country through its mandate.
“There should be a synergy and coordination between the relevant agencies. Instead of us seeing ourselves as rivals, we should see it as part of the general effort to developed Nigeria’s economy.
“The most important thing is the collective effect it will have on the country”.
