IN LINE with the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed recently by the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and the Community Awareness on Development Network (CAWAN), two million young entrepreneurs are to benefit from a two week training programme scheduled to take place in the six geo-political zones of the country including Abuja.
Specifically, the training is scheduled to encourage entrepreneurship among young Nigerians across the country.
Between now and the end of the year, SMEDAN, a Federal Government agency will work with CAWAN, a non-profit organization to provide training and skill acquisition to Nigerian youths as one of the fallout of the MoU.
Speaking at a press briefing in Abuja, Director General of SMEDAN, Bature Umar Masari explained that the agency will assist the trainees to harness all available provisions to make their business take off smoothly after the training.
He explained that though SMEDAN do not give out money to SMEs, the agency would leverage on its collaborations with financial institutions and other agencies to help the development of SMEs in the country, adding that they are the engine of economic turn-around of any serious minded nation.
His words, “A very important aspect of SMEDAN’s intervention is to facilitate other factors of production, which means when an entrepreneur had already acquired the skill, the next question on the mind of such person is how to go about the startup of the business.
“So, issues of access to finance, access to office space, access to market and even access to information comes into play. What SMEDAN does is to look at existing collaborations we have with other agencies and organizations that would now come in and provide all these factors of production. There are certain things that SMEDAN can do, but the ones we cannot do are handled by other sister organizations.
“SMEDAN does not give money, but we have very important collaborations with institutions like the Bank of Industry (BoI), DFID, Bank of Agriculture, a number of micro finance banks and even some international development partners like USAID and others. So, we use these organizations to bring a lot of interventions as the situation demands’’.
He said with the Bank of Industry alone, there are about fourteen windows where money are domiciled, adding that those monies can only be accessed based on the specific area an entrepreneur is specialised in.
Citing the area of mining, Bello said there are poll of funds in the BoI under mining and can only be given to those who are interested in the sector.
He said the assistance SMEDAN can render to young entrepreneurs is to push with the institution on how best to access the money and assist in the negotiation of terms that would make things easy for entrepreneurs as a way of making their business take off easy with less stress.
Masari who was represented by the director, enterprises and promotion, Ado Bello said: “We have shared responsibilities from both parties, on the part of SMEDAN, we will join hands with the organization to do the mobilization and the selection of the trainees and while doing that, we would concentrate on two areas of focus.
“One, we would be doing some purposeful discussions with them as well as applying some questionnaires on them in order to get the best because it is not everyone that is trainable.
“We have to pick the ones that can be trained and equally be able to pick up some enterprises after the training. The second aspect is to provide the training components. CAWAN is responsible for the skills acquisition proper while SMEDAN will now come up with the entrepreneurship aspect.
“We have a number of specialised modules and those modules are specifically based on project specimens. We look at your line of enterprise and be able to know the kind of module that is applicable to you.
“They are all practical in nature, it is not teaching per se. We facilitate and it’s more of interactive sections. We would try to bring out the best in every entrepreneur and then be able to guide him or her on which project to embark on and even how to manage it’’.
He said the training programme will feature components of business plans writing which would expose participants on how to come up with business plans that are bankable.
He explained that the agency had also contacted consultants who will help trainees to fashion their business plans in situations where participants cannot do it on their own.
The essence of this he said is to make such business plans attract funding from financial institutions that may be willing to bank roll such projects.
He said the agency had also come up with solution of lack of space for entrepreneur after their training by allocating spaces where they can start their businesses to them free of charge for a period of nine months after which individual entrepreneur will be made to stand on their own.
According to him, the agency had also partnered the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and NAFDAC for easy business registrations and certification of products of entrepreneurs under its incubation.
The national coordinator of CAWAN, Chike Adaka submitted that organization decided to organize the training for young Nigerians in order to capture them and expose them to career building skills that would eventually shift them from being job seekers to employers of labour.
