ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA: EVIDENCE FROM KANO STATE
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Nigeria is naturally endowed with entrepreneurship opportunities; but the belief of the total potential of those opportunities has been dampened by the adoption of inappropriate industrialization policies at dierent times. Many policy interventions that were geared towards stimulating entrepreneurship development via small and medium scale enterprises promotion, supported by technology transfer strategy, have failed to achieve the desired goals as it led to the most indigenous entrepreneurs becoming distribution agents of imported products as opposed to building in-country entrepreneurial capacity for manufacturing, mechanized agriculture and expert services (Thaddeus, 2012). Entrepreneurship is one of the economic variables that attract the attention of
governments and researchers both in the developed and developing countries in the last two decades. Several eorts and initiatives are being made by governments and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to promote entrepreneurship and contribute to the overall economic growth and development. Interests in the entrepreneurial development continue to be in the forefront of policy debates in the developing countries, especially Nigeria. Recently, private sector has dominated the entrepreneurial development policies globally. Baig (2013) opine that the non-public sector will contribute to economic growth, job creation, and national income and hence to national prosperity and competitiveness. According to her, the non-public sector contributes considerably to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and therefore unleashing domestic resources (financial and entrepreneurial) is probably going to form a more stable and sustainable pattern of growth. Entrepreneurship is a key factor in any economic activity. For a sector to be competitive and contribute
eectively to sustain growth, it requires increased private investment. This development must result in an enhanced productivity to stimulate and to be proper; it must also generate employment opportunity. There can be no gain-saying that Nigeria has long recognized the importance and valuable contributions that small and medium enterprises (SMEs – oen disaggregated into micro-enterprises and SMEs) as a major source of new competition can make to poverty alleviation, wealth creation, employment generation and private sector development. The SMEs, especially micro –enterprises have for long oered safety net for the survival of the poor, unemployed youths and women including the emergent “new poor”, this is as well as being the nursery-bed of
entrepreneurship development in the nation. These SMEs have consistently served as a vehicle not only for the poor to raise their income but also acquiring and applying skills to raise productivity for indigenous (and may be multinational) private sector growth, providing better wage earning opportunities for the majority of the polity (70%) that are poor while raising our national income. It is for these reasons that successive Nigerian governments, since independence, have always tried to promote SME sector through a complementary range of fiscal, financial and advisory services. Entrepreneurship is the dynamic process of creating incremental wealth. The wealth is formed by people who took the major risks in terms of equity, time and career commitment or provide value for some products or unique, however value must be infused by the entrepreneur by receiving and locating the mandatory skills and resources. Entrepreneurship is also the method of entering into managing your own business enterprise. Whereas entrepreneurs are individuals or persons, entrepreneurship is a process. At times the terms “entrepreneur” and “owner manager” are used interchangeably as if they mean the same thing because entrepreneurship is inextricably linked to small business management. Entrepreneurs are oen
both owners and employees and a considerable number of them are of them are small business owners or managers. Such people are risk takers, creative, innovative, independent, hardworking and posses other
qualities that are driving force behind any entrepreneurial activities in the economy. These entrepreneurial activities significantly affect the economy of an area by building the economics of an area by building the economic base and providing jobs. The focus of this paper is therefore, to explore entrepreneurship development in Nigeria, to determine what the problems, issues militate against entrepreneurship development in Nigeria and profer solutions to them
