PIND’s Business Linkages program seeks to promote a business environment in which local small and medium sized enterprises in the Niger Delta can compete in domestic, regional and global markets and can contribute significantly to wealth and job creation in both the Niger Delta as well as nationally.

Small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) in the Niger Delta region face a host of challlenges that militate against their competitiveness and potential. Some of these include: poor technical and business, management skills, poor access to finance and weak access to market information, particularly large institutional buyers. We did our research, and learned that improving capacity among local SMEs is critical to developing an enabling environment in which markets can grow and thrive.

As part of work to make small businesses in the Niger Delta more competitive and profitable, PIND’s Business Linkages team trains business service providers (BSPs, as we like to call them) to improve the quality of support that small businesses in the Niger Delta receive.

These BSPs have worked to help small businesses access loans, provided business advisory services, trained businesses on record-keeping, established market linkages and linked businesses to assistance from the Technical Assistance Facility (TAF), which PIND co-funds to support the region’s small businesses.

Our BSPs are great, because they have been absolutely essential to improving SMEs’ access to capital. The Technical Assistance Fund (TAF), an initiative set up by PIND, provides technical support to small and medium-scale enterprises through PIND-trained business service providers and helps raise awareness of SMEs in the region on the benefits of using business service providers to bolster their profitability and efficiency.