Small and Medium Enterpries Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) has held a virtual event for validation of the National Policy on MSMEs during which the Chairman of the governing board of the agency, Chief Femi Pedro enjoined operators of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in all categories to register on the SMEDAN website to benefit from the existing national policy for MSMEs.
In his words “SMEDAN has a registration system which is online and made available free of charge for all MSMEs in all categories.“SMEDAN will give you a unique identification number and in the form questions are asked whether you are registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) or not’.
Pedro also stated “If you are not yet registered with CAC, SMEDAN will assist you in registering your business at a very cheap rate. “The information made available will help us and the Federal Government to be able to marshal and implement the existing national policy on MSMEs. We want all the over 40 million MSMEs in Nigeria to be registered with SMEDAN, it makes SMEDAN work a lot easier and implementation will be easier”.
He assured the stakeholders that the Governing Board of SMEDAN will take the implementation of the national policy very seriously. “When we all get together four years from now, we will have lots of exciting things to say about how the policy has been implemented,” Pedro also said.
Dr Samuel Adebiyi, the consultant who spoke on the new policy said “the point of integrating MSMEs to the public procurement system is also clearly provided in the new policy in fact with more bite now. Because it has always been in the policy; it was in the first policy and second version which was a revised version of the first and up till now, we have not seen the effect which is bringing us to a point raised that implementation is key.”
