CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1     BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

A microfinance institution is a semi formal organization. It can be non government al or community development initiative. It is a subset of flexible structures and system which provide a wide range of financial and saving needs of small scale enterprises in developing countries where top town formal financial institutions have failed to address the credit need off the real sector of the economy.

The Nigeria microfinance institution have come along way,  a central bank study has identified as at 2001, 160 registered microfinance institutions in Nigeria with aggregate savings worth N99.4m and outstanding credit of N649.1m indicating huge business transactions in the business (Anyanwu, 2004). Institutional structures for the provision of micro credit vary and may be government, NGO supported, traditional, or mixture of two or more of these, there are all those that operate on the line of informal models. They are credit and savings association which are based on the traditionally experience, they provides savings and credit services to their members.

Despite the availability of microfinance and the establishment of microfinance institutions in Nigeria, there are yet no established government policies and mechanisms for regulating and supervising activities in the sector (Anyanwu, 2004). In 2000, a national conference on microfinance was organized by the federal government of Nigeria and the world bank recommended that the central bank of Nigeria to take up the responsibility of developing an appropriate Policy as well as regulatory and supervisory frame work for the operation of microfinance institutions. The workshop recognized that the development of appropriate microfinance policy was critical to the development of sustainable microfinance institutions and by implicated through micro enterprises in Nigeria. (CBN, 2001).