CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1       Background of the study

Entrepreneurship is one of the economic variables that attract the attention of government and researchers both in developed and developing countries in the last two decades. Several efforts and initiatives have being made by governments and Non-Governmental Organization (NGOs) to promote entrepreneurship and contribute to the overall economic growth and development. Interests in the entrepreneurship development to be in the forefront of policy debates in developing countries especially Nigeria. Recently, private sector has dominated the entrepreneurial development policies globally (Zubair, 2014).

With the collapse of the last vestiges of the socialist economic system in 1990s, virtually the whole world has embraced free enterprise economic system. Entrepreneurship is the cornerstone and the heart of the free enterprise economy (Popoola, 2014). Entrepreneurship is an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organising markets, processes and raw material through organising effort that previously had not existed (Shance and Ventaramen 2000).

According to Afolabi (2015) Studies by UNIDO Nigeria 2012 shows that micro, small and medium enterprise (SMEs) has the propensity to drive the Nigerian economy and data reveal that there are currently over 4 million MSMEs employing over 31 million Nigerians MSMEs account for over 80% of enterprises that employ about 75% of the Nigeria’s total work force and therefore formulating and effectively implementing SMEs friendly policies represents innovative ways of building the capacity to engage in entrepreneurial activities and creating job opportunities thus, playing a central and invaluable role in helping Nigeria realize its quantity advantage.