Impact of small and medium enterprise on employment generation in Nigeria

CHAPTER ONE

     INTRODUCTION

1.0BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

In Nigeria, empirical report shows that an estimate of about 70% of the industrial employment is held by Small Business Enterprises and more than 50% of the Gross Domestic Product is small business enterprises’ generated (Odeyemi, 2003). Given the seminal role of Small businesses to employment generation in Nigeria, various regimes of Government since independence in the 1960s, have focused on various programmes and spent immense amount of money with the primary goal of improving the generation of employment, these have however not yielded any significant results as evident in the present state of the Small businesses in the country (Mambula, 1997). 

Small businesses are generally very susceptible and only a certain number of them manage to survive due to several factors such as difficulty in accessing credits from banks and other financial institutions; harsh economic conditions which results from unstable government policies; gross undercapitalization, inadequacies resulting from the highly dilapidated state of Infrastructural facilities; astronomically high operating costs; lack of transparency and corruption; and the lack of interest and lasting support for the Small businesses sector by government authorities, to mention a few (Oboh 2002; Okpara 2000; Wale-Awe 2000).