SMEDAN urges SMEs to embrace partnerships, training to prevent failure

THE Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) on Wednesday said that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) fail because they lacked structures, partnerships and basic skills.

  The South-West Coordinator of SMEDAN, Segun Ogundeji, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos that the problems were made glaring by lack of operational funds.
   Ogundeji said the agency had been organising training for SME owners on establishing durable structures, and administrative skills and urged more people to take advantage of the training.

  ``The problem with some of our entrepreneurs is that they believe so much in themselves that they don’t like to seek for partnerships from proper structures before starting their businesses.

  ``They prefer to go to the banks which may not even entertain them because of their poorly written proposals, and the myopic presentation of their businesses.

   ``For a start, we don’t encourage them to go to banks to access loans. We have always advised them to bring their bankable business plans to us and they can find investors.

   “We are working on daily basis in our training to sensitize them on different windows to access funds asides waiting for government funds, or intervention.

   ``For those who have taken to that path, we have seen a lot of improvement, for instance, in food packaging business, printing, and fashion related businesses,” he said.

   He also said that the training organised by SMEDAN were centered on how SMEs could access funds through equity, instead of just capital funding to bridge the wide gap of businesses dying due to lack of funds.

   He also urged small business owners to create more partnerships in order to pull resources together and maximize higher profits and create more jobs for the masses.

   NAN recalls that SMEDAN had earlier announced it plans to train one million small business owners across the country by the end of 2015.

   According to SMEDAN, they have trained up to 500,000 entrepreneurs within two years between 2012 and 2014.

Culled from http://www.ngrguardiannews.com