Stakeholders in the Nation’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises have been advised to envision scaling up their businesses to become industries, by maximising available opportunities in skill acquisition, innovation and digital technology among other parameters.
This was the crux of the discussion at the 11th Policy Dialogue Series on Entrepreneurship by the Fate Foundation Institute, an initiative of one of the nation’s foremost banker, Mr. Fola Adeola, with the theme "From Enterprise to Industry: Unlocking the MSME Potential for Nigeria's Industrialisation," at Lagos.
Speaking at the event, Minister of State for Trade and Investment, Senator John Owan Enoh, opined that MSMEs constitute 90 per cent of businesses, accounting for 46.7 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, (GDP), employing approximately 85 per cent of Nigerians.
Enoh said the Tinubu-led Federal Government realised that MSMEs could not be operating on the sidelines. “When the President talks about a 1 trillion dollar economy, he was looking at the MSMEs. I believe industrialisation is the prosperity of the nation, because of its strength in creating labour and adding value to people. Hence, the way to go is to develop the MSMEs to become industries’’.
The Trade Minister said the Federal government was working to build an industrial economy where MSMEs would not struggle, but would be assisted to scale up, noting that with continuous manufacturing and innovations, growth would not shrink and the youth would become more enterprising, thus becoming the strength of the country.
Enoh said the country’s population of over 220million, 65 percent of which are Youths whose energy should be deployed to the MSMEs sector, as the public service could not accommodate all of them, hence, entrepreneurship drive would be the way to go.
The Secretary to the State Government and Chairman of the Communications and Advocacy Committee of the Fate Foundation, Mr. Tokunbo Talabi said there was a dire need to come up with innovations that would help the nation transit from a hussle-driven economy to one centered on productivity, manufacturing and competitive value chain, drawing examples from global essence and local realities.
Talabi said as the chairman of the Communications and Advocacy committee, he was proud of the quality, clarity and rigor of the 2025 State of Entrepreneurship report of the Fate Foundation, urging stakeholders to work together toward addressing the issues raised in the report towards changing the narrative from MSMEs to an industrial economy.
In his opening remarks, Chairman of the Fate Foundation, Mr. Fola Adeola stated that time was ripe for the nation to come up with a pragmatic and effective entrepreneurship policy needed for industrial revolution.
Adeola advocated that government, entrepreneurs and Stakeholders in MSME sector must begin to prioritize the prerequisite of industrialization which included Perception of Opportunities, skills acquisitions, Innovation and Digital Technology.
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