ANDE Says SMEs Need Ease Of Doing Business Policy
The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) has identified small and traction-gaining businesses as the ones that have the potential to become the global powerhouses of shared prosperity to bring about growth, promote all-around sustainability and bolster equity.
Along this line, the network has urged that the government should make policy on the ease of doing business for the Small and Medium Scale Enterprises sector.
The speakers at the just finalized two-day ANDE West Africa regional conference in Lagos, an event that was supported by the DFID Impact Program, told the audience that more and more jobs would be created if the government intervened in the areas of policy.
The chairman of the Steering Committee of ANDE West Africa, Peter Bamkole, said that the Federal Government needs to enact new policies that would go a long way in driving the growth of Small and Growing Businesses (SGBs), as well as their operators in the region.
According to Peter, who is also the Executive Director of the Enterprise Development Center (EDC) of Pan-Atlantic University, Small and Growing Businesses are the driving force for the economy today, because they contribute 50 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
At the opening of the plenary which was tagged: “Looking Back on the West African Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Projecting Forward”, the participants Peter Bamkole and Tenemba Anna Samake, the CEO of MBC Africa, noted that the entrepreneurial ecosystem of West Africa is experiencing geometric-level growth, but agreed that a number of challenges still exist, as well as a lot of possibilities.
Ease of Doing Business is an index that was published by the World Bank to be an aggregate figure that includes different parameters that define the actual comfort with which one can do business in a country. The index is arrived at by the aggregation of distance to frontier scores of different economies.
