SMEDAN Trains 50 MSMEs On Best Practices In Delta

The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) on Wednesday trained no fewer than 50 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) operators on best practices in Delta.
The Agency’s training tagged: “Grant and Growth Support (GROSS) for Business Membership Organisations (BMOs), Trade Associations (TAs) and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) held in Asaba, Delta.
The SMEDAN Delta Coordinator, Mr Adeleke Babalola, in an interview, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) said that the programme had engaged other sister agencies to interface with the participants to know their challenges and to proffer solutions.
“The programme is tagged GROSS, it is targeted at BMOs, TAs and NGOs, and SMEDAN is interfacing with other agencies like Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), National Agency for Food, Drugs Adminstration and Control (NAFDAC), Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF), to educate and sensitise the participants.
” The essence is to addressed the challenges of the participants and ensure ease of doing business in the state.”
According to Babalola, the participants were painstakingly selected to participate in this first phase of the interface with relevant agencies.
He said the participants would be engaged in technical sections where the individuals would come up with their identifiable challenges that required specified solutions.
He noted that not all challenges are financial, adding that some challenges may be due to lack of or absence of right information on the ease of doing business.
“The technical brake out sections will help to identify their specific challenges and when we are able to gather all the information from the participants, it will be processed and that will inform the nature of intervention and grant that they need,” he said.
According to him the participants are women and men aged between 18 and 45 years and operators of MSMEs drawn from BMOs, TAs and NGOs.
He said that SMEDAN has closely worked and monitored progress of the MSMEs, adding that had informed the selection pattern and that after the training, there would be a feedback from the participants which would enable the Agency decide the second phase of the training.
Representatives from the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), NAFDAC, NSITF were visible interfacing with the participants to guide them on what they required to operate their businesses effectively.
According to Faith Joseph, a representative of the CAC, the interface is a sensitisation process to ensure that the participants register their companies and pay their annual returns to the commission.
“This is because it is illegal to start any business without registration. So, we are interfacing with the participants to sensitise them on how to register their businesses on their own and not to engage services of agents.”
Some of the participants, thanked SMEDAN and other partners for the workshop which has help to expose them to veritable information that would effectively help run their businesses without hitches.