The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), on Monday, trained 104 young men and women on entrepreneurship in Ogun.
The State Coordinator,Mr Bunmi Kole-Daodu, said at the training centre in Sagamu that the essence of the training was to encourage a new sense of business practice.
Kole-Daodu said that the training programme by SMEDAN would enable young entrepreneurs to run successful businesses and remain productive.
He further said that the core duty of SMEDAN was to help develop small and medium enterprises, noting that there were three major challenges young entrepreneurs faced — working capital, working equipment and work space.
“Some young people are also in this business, but because of challenge of fund, some of them cannot meet up with the expectations on the demand for their businesses.
“We need to help them and support them in some way. SMEDAN gave it a thought that it will be better not only to give them money, but also to encourage them in entrepreneurship education first, before intervention and support.
“We found out that for most young people, the greatest challenge they have in doing business is work space, and this programme targets the work space, but first, entrepreneurship training.
“We started with 200 participants; we did a sensitisation programme and we screened to 104. We have Abeokuta and Sagamu centres,” he said.
The SMEDAN coordinator said it was important to reduce reliance on white-collar jobs, adding that the training was to make young entrepreneurs self-reliant and also create employment.
The coordinator said that the Federal Government, through the agency, sought the development and promotion of the Micro Small and Medium Enterprise sector in Nigeria.
“There are so many legal and regulatory issues that most young business people do not know, like formalising the business, opening an account for it, linkage with bigger companies. We train them on business plans.
“We want to see a structured sub-sector small and medium enterprise; well arranged and well planned,” he said.
One of the participants, Waheed Adebayo, said that the training would help them to manage and handle business effectively after being nurtured by SMEDAN.
