Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises (SMEs) are an important segment of every economy. In Nigeria, SMEs account for a significant 86% of the national workforce and about 50% of the country’s gross domestic product. The industry is the vanguard of innovation, output expansion, employment creation, exports, income redistribution and entrepreneurship and is thus a major driver of industrial growth and development in Nigeria.
The emergence of the novel COVID-19 pandemic adversely impacted the sales and revenues of SMEs in 2020 with many forced to scale down operations or shut down. The Industry remains bedeviled by an inability to access finance attributable to the unwillingness of banks to lend to players, operators lackadaisical attitude towards record keeping and lack of awareness about available government interventions.
The 2021 Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises report focuses on three key segments of the industry: E-retailing, Cement Distributorship and Apparels. Some of the key themes captured in the report are:
