The Federal Government has started paying successful artisans who applied for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) Survival Fund in Lagos State.
Tola Johnson, the Special Assistant to the President on MSMEs/DFIs, disclosed that in the Bariga cluster, over 400 people had benefitted from the scheme while another 11 clusters have been approved for payment.
Johnson made the statement at the activation of the Artisan Scheme of the MSME Survival Fund by the Bank of Industry in Bariga area of Lagos on Thursday.
He said the fund was established to ease the negative impact of COVID-19 on small businesses.
He said, “It is no news that the pandemic affected many businesses and the government in its wisdom thought about how it could support different clusters of people. We have people for the payroll support, the artisan and the transport sectors.
“We also have people that we give money to cushion the effect of the pandemic on their businesses. The Federal Government resolved to support 500,000 people every month for three months, while also supporting 303,000 artisans with N30,000 one-off grant and N50,000 to about 100,000 businesses that have been affected by the pandemic.”
According to him, the federal government monitoring and evaluating the disbursement process to ensure that what was approved is what is being done.
Johnson added, “We are carrying out this programme in phases so that we can learn from the mistakes of the first and correct in the second stream. We are actually trying to monitor to a large extent to ensure that what was approved is what is being done.”
He said a second stream of states was waiting for approval for disbursement.
“For the payroll segment, we will let the public know when we want to commence disbursement. Every state has about 6,600 new business names to be registered for free, but the Federal Government is paying N6, 000 per business to the Corporate Affairs Commission.”