The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), has said it is working out modalities that would help push the contributions of Micro Small and Medium Enterprises, MSMEs, to the national export basket from the current six percent to a minimum of 10 percent within the next three years.
Director-General of SMEDAN, Mr. Olawale Fasanya, said this in his welcome address at the Maiden National Conference on MSMEs with the theme: “Driving MSME Competitiveness via Public-Private Collaboration” held in Lagos.
Fasanya said that the last National MSME Survey jointly conducted by SMEDAN and the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, put the total number of MSMEs in Nigeria at over 39 million which is why the sub-sector is very critical at the global, national and sub-national levels especially for socio-economic reasons.
He stated: “In Nigeria and according to the 2021 MSME Survey report, MSMEs contribute only 6.21 percent to the total export basket of Nigeria compared to 49.35 percent in India in 2021 and 68 percent in China in 2020.”
“This relatively low contribution of Nigeria’s MSMEs to exports is largely attributed to the poor competitive nature of the sub-sector. As part of our culture of working in partnerships to achieve our mandate, we have used the huge benefit that is available in the public-private collaborations to organise this National Conference.”
“Essentially, the conference would provide the much-needed platform to proffer ways and means of making the 39 million MSMEs competitive in global market space. We want to see how we can push the contributions of MSMEs to national export basket from the current six percent to a minimum of 10 percent within the next three years.”