The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, SMEDAN, says the agency will support Nigeria MSMEs through its SMEDAN SELECT initiative, designed to create brands from standard products amongst the best Made-in-Nigeria products in the food, fashion, beauty and goods sectors.

The Director General, Small Medium Enterprise Development Association of Nigeria (SMEDAN) said this during the launch of the SMEDAN SELECT Document in Enugu.

Represented by the by Director, Planning, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation, Wale Fasanya, Radda said the products, numbering about 150, have been specially sought and selected across Nigeria to be displayed and marketed on the SMEDAN Website and other social media handles.

He said that the hardcopy catalogues of those brands, would also be distributed to Embassies, MDAs and in departmental stores across major cities in Nigeria to improve the patronage of these products.

Radda noted that the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (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”

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 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 that 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.

The Director General 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.