The Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency (SMEDAN) on Wednesday said most businesses being referred to as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) were actually micro-businesses, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.
Dikko Rahama, the Director-General of SMEDAN said in Lagos that most SMEs were still running informal structures with capital base of less than N10 million.
Rahama urged the government to empower the agency more through the Conditional Grant Scheme to give them more capacity to help more businesses to become formal.
“Out of the 36 million SMEs in Nigeria, about 90 per cent of them are micro-businesses, with less than one to 10 staff members and no concrete accounts and tax records.
“We have a lot of work to do to upgrade these businesses to formal entities in order to increase their potential.
“That is why we are advocating for the Conditional Grant Scheme which is to assist them with funds and other support programmes to scale up.
“With this platform, there should be an easier access to business and regulatory registrations, insurance cover, strategy and evaluation for the SMEs.
“We look forward to the amendment of the SMEDAN Act to give us more capacity to create more internally generated revenue, instead of relying on internally generated revenues to achieve our mandate,” he said.
Waheed Olagunju, the acting Managing Director, Bank of Industry (BoI), had said that SMEs and micro-businesses should keep proper records to make them attractive to banks when they need to scale up.
