For many of Nigeria’s small businesses, expansion often creates as many problems as it solves.
Sales are logged in one application, inventory in another, payroll is calculated on spreadsheets and customer records are scattered across WhatsApp chats and paper files.
By the time financial reports are reconciled, weeks may have passed, leaving owners to make critical decisions with incomplete information.
The operational inefficiencies are largely hidden but expensive. Stock leakages go undetected, payroll mistakes expose firms to regulatory risks, tax obligations are missed and employees spend hours transferring data between disconnected systems instead of serving customers.
For Nigeria’s more than 39 million micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which account for almost half of economic output and employ the bulk of the country’s workforce, fragmented operations have become a persistent drag on productivity, even as policymakers push digitisation and formalisation.
