Financial Gap and Sustainable Government Financial Interventions to Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Nigeria: Developing a Sustainable Framework

The Nigerian government, having considered the oil price volatility and the need to address its high reliance of its budget on oil, by diversifying the economy, has embarked on a series of programmes and reforms to boost non-oil sector of the economy, most importantly, the SME subsector. Financing interventions of government would have ordinarily been a succor to change the narrative of ugly financial accessibility of SMEs, but, the level of accessibility and its relationship to SMEs have largely been understudied. Hence, this study seeks to examine the deficiencies in the government interventions to SMEs and present a workable financial intervention framework. Both primary and secondary data were used for this study. Primary data were gathered through the administration of questionnaires. Purposive sampling technique was adopted to select 100 registered SMEs in each of the six states of the Southwest Nigeria, while 100 unregistered SMEs were equally selected for inclusiveness totaling 700. The data were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential analytical methods with the aid of SPSS. The study has documented the deficiencies of the previous interventions to include poor design of the programme, favoritism in the disbursement of financing facilities, low level of awareness of the facilities, difficulty in the procedures for accessing government financing support. The study thus proposed a framework where the guarantee scheme is designed into result-based financing where the designated scheme will just give guarantee to the banks to provide loan without collateral and with reduced interest, and a first-time loan which will be jointly financed by the banks and the scheme