The Nigeria International Trade Fair returned on November 21 after years of cancellation, bringing back one of the country’s major commercial events with a new mission focused on data-driven support and large-scale business formalization.
Speaking to Business Insider Africa on the opening day, Charles Odii, Director General of the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), said the fair is positioned to generate billions of Naira, just as it did before its long break.
Odii noted that about 22,000 small and medium enterprises are participating this year, a significant comeback for an event that had been dormant for years.
“So there are approximately 22,000 small and medium enterprises that will be exhibiting here, and the last time that we organized this kind of exhibition in conjunction with the local government, we did over 3 billion Naira,” he said.
“So we’re very optimistic that the numbers will be around that for this, but at the end of the day, we will track and see. I’m certain that the benchmark will be at least 3 billion naira.” He added that this revival is strengthened by more advanced data insights and a greater focus on Nigeria’s largely informal economy.
A key part of Odii’s remarks focused on the renewed effort to formalize hundreds of thousands of informal businesses. He explained that SMEDAN recently partnered with Moniepoint to carry out one of the largest studies ever conducted on informal enterprises.
“One of the things that we did was we conducted a study with one of our partners, Moniepoint, and we spoke to 5 million informal businesses. As a result of that, we’ve begun to use the data to drive informed decisions.”
The findings underscored how cash-dependent Nigeria’s economy still is, and how informality continues to hinder business expansion, access to credit, and regulatory oversight.
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From this study emerged a major intervention. “So far, we’ve gotten a free 250,000 business registration with Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), and we are hoping that by the end of this year, we’ll be able to formalize 250,000 small businesses, and that’s the pilot phase of this project.”
Odii also highlighted the scale and fragility of the SME sector. “The last time we counted, we did the census, we had approximately 39,604,385 small and medium enterprises… We had approximately 41 million small and medium enterprises, and that was before COVID.
We saw that we lost 3 million small and medium enterprises, and this was as a result of different factors.”
Drawing from the new data, he outlined four major steps the agency is implementing. “What these small businesses use the money for, and the data also shows that we are still a very cash-driven economy right now. With this, we’ve begun to do 4 important things.
One is guiding our businesses, giving them the right guidance that they need to start and scale their enterprises. Set up a one-stop shop where anyone who is doing business needs to come to us first, and we can point them in the right direction.
If a small business is facing any business problems, we are their advocates. We set up a National Council for small businesses that are having a problem.”
He said these efforts are already yielding measurable results, especially in financing access. “At those levels, we’ve been able to solve many problems, one of which has become very critical to raising 12 billion naira at single-digit interest rates for our small businesses.”
Odii added that SMEDAN has secured presidential approval to expand free CAC registrations on an unprecedented scale. “So the other thing that we’re going to do is to see that we have a higher rate of informalized businesses, and that informed us to go to Mr President to ask for $250,000 free with the first pilot for formalizing these businesses.
We’ve gone to Mr President, and we’ve gotten this go-ahead for the first quarter, a quarter of a million for our small businesses, and we hope to increase from that.”
Although the fair is projected to generate over ₦3 billion in commercial activity, its broader purpose now stretches beyond exhibitions.
It has become a national platform for formalizing businesses, improving digital inclusion, expanding access to finance, and strengthening protections for SMEs, ushering in a more structured approach to supporting the millions of enterprises that power Nigeria’s economy.
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Image Credit: Nigerian Export Promotion Council
