The Director General, Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agencies (SMEDAN), Charles Odii, has said that Sterling Bank recently offered N5 billion as a loan for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to upgrade their businesses.
He, however, revealed that just N250 million has so far been disbursed across the 36 states in Nigeria, including the Federal Capital Territory, FCT.
Speaking during the signing of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the two organisations, Odii confirmed that the N5 billion is not a grant, but a loan to be accessed and paid back.
According to him, SMEDAN has found it really hard to disburse the loans thus far, and while the money is available to be distributed, it simply cannot be accessed by several small businesses due to a lack of capacity and non-keeping of business records.
He stated that his agency is currently working via its business clinics to train more people and then license them, mainly to boost their capacity to unlock their businesses.
“We are experiencing stunted disbursements in these loans because it is not going the way we expected, the small businesses do not have the right capacity and again most of the small businesses are run without records. We are working through our business clinics to train more people and license them to increase their capacity to unlocking their businesses.
At Q1 we have so far trained 12000 business owners through some of our partners and we plan to do more to equip the capacity of our businesses. For the loan assessment, the state that really did well in the area of loan acceessment is Katsina State.
The present governor of Katsina State, who was a one-time Director-General SMEDAN, Umar Dikko Radda, leveraged the information and ensured the state’s SMEs benefitted from these loans; 204 from the state accessed the loan. Katsina State alone was able to do about N200 million in the disbursement.
We have disbursed approximately N250million across the 36 states of the federation including the federal Capital Territory FCT which is only five per cent of the funds available. We have also signed a MoU with other state governments and BoI, so we can disburse more loans to small businesses,” he said.
