Virtue or vice? Public policies and Nigerian entrepreneurial venture performance

What is it about?

The Micro, Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (MSMEs) sector is crucial for social prosperity, innovativeness and economic growth. However, available evidence suggests that a lot of challenges impede Africa’s MSMEs, making it difficult for them to unleash their full potentials. It is thus crucial that governments strive to ensure their sustainability by formulating policies to ease their business environment. In this study, we interrogated how public policies impact sustainability of MSMEs. Specifically, we examined the depth of inter-agency engagement across levels of government and how this influence sustainability programmes for MSMEs; explored the extent to which agencies optimise the role of association of businesses such as Chambers of Commerce and Industry (CCI) – as mediators of MSMEs sustainability – and assessed the relevance of government’s taxation, business registration and access to finance policies to the desired sustainability outcomes among MSMEs in Osun, one of Nigeria’s 36 states. Data were primarily drawn from questionnaires administered to MSMEs owners and semi-structured interviews with officials. These were complemented with Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with leading members of the state CCI. We show that amidst deeper levels of engagement among governmental agencies and with CCIs, the benefits of the different policies and programmes that they anchor mostly elude MSMEs. Also, government policies are mostly tangential to the desired sustainability outcomes among MSMEs.

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