MSME Survival Funds: Understanding the General Grant Scheme

The Minister of State, Industry, Trade and Investment, Mrs Mariam Yelwaji Katagum has Wednesday disclosed that the MSME Survival Funds General Grants would take off from November 27, 2020 as contained in Daily Trust, 25th November, 2020.

A lot of Nigerians who awaited the opening of the portal for the registration had wondered why they were left in the dark as the portal https://www.survivalfund.gov.ng remained inaccessible.

But according to Mrs Katagum in her statement, "this group of beneficiaries(the General Grant) is encouraged to take advantage of registration through MSME associations, registered business clusters, trade associations, and unions."

The statement above implies that just like the Artisan/Transport Supports, the application process would be direct data capture of registered clusters such as associations or Unions of Enterprises.

Ajuri Ngelale, Senior Special Assistant to President Mohammadu Buhari on Public Affairs, had during an interactive segment on the MoneyLine Program with Nancy Nnaji on African Independent Televission (AIT) while explaining the Artisan/Transport Grant noted that to ensure capture of individuals who truly needed the Grant, direct capture of Association/Union has been considered more effective other than throwing the program to those who are just on Twitter waiting for application portal to open without any MSME experience or existing businesses.

Similarly, the Project Cordinator and Special Assistant to President Mohammadu Buhari on MSME, Mr Tola Johnson, and the Director General of SMEDAN, Dikko Umaru Radda in separate speeches during a supervisory visit to Apo Mechanic Village, Abuja to oversee the Activation of the Artisans in the area, noted that it was a necessity for the Federal Government to ensure that the process is not only free and fair but also reaches the beneficiaries who are truly in need of it.

Umaru furthered that similar approaches would be employed to other components of the Programme including the Guranteed Offtake Scheme, to ensure that the Grant actually gets to the people.

The General Grant Scheme is a category of the Federal Government N75B MSME Survival Fund Programme whereby 100,000 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in Nigeria would recieve a grant of N50,000 each as COVID-19 Relief Support.