Kingsley Ndimele LLC- Consulting & Policy Advisory

Anatomy of the Trust Deficit Understanding this trust gap requires confronting its roots with honesty. It did not emerge from thin air. It was built, layer by layer, through decades of lived experience and observed reality. CONTINUE READING HERE kingsleyndimele.com/the-trust-defi…

The reason, as Dr. Odii’s observation makes clear, is not ignorance of the existence of these funds. It is a rational withdrawal from a system that has, over time, forfeited the public’s trust.

THE TRUST DEFICIT: WHY NIGERIAN MSMES ARE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE In a candid and revealing observation, Dr. Charles Odii, Director-General of the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN),

CONTINUE READING HERE lnkd.in/gmGSKsGs

The KPMG Effect: Trust as a Financial Instrument The decision to engage KPMG as the independent selection manager is more than a reputational flourish. It represents a deliberate architectural choice to institutionalize trust within the programme.

Government-led MSME programmes have repeatedly fallen into this trust deficit. Beneficiary selection has often been criticized for political colouring, elite capture, or outright opacity.

Entrepreneurs, in turn, doubt the fairness of programmes they apply to. This mutual distrust inflates transaction costs, suppresses participation, and ultimately misallocates what capital does flow. The result is a financing gap that cannot be solved by capital injection alone.

The Problem: Why MSME Financing Fails in Nigeria Nigeria’s micro, small, and medium enterprise sector employs an estimated 80 percent of the workforce and contributes nearly half of GDP. Yet access to formal finance remains one of the sector’s most persistent barriers.

But beneath these structural constraints lies a more insidious problem: a crisis of credibility. Funders - whether banks, development finance institutions, or philanthropic bodies struggle to trust the integrity of MSME selection processes.

The challenges are well-documented: weak financial records, informality of operations, high perceived risk, and the prohibitive cost of credit intermediation in a volatile macroeconomic environment.