From TCNEWS
As some countries across the globe celebrate the year 2024 Small Business Saturday, critical stakeholders in the business sector have asserted that supporting small businesses would positively boost the local economy, tax base, schools, and infrastructure.
Interacting with our correspondent respectively through WhatsApp chat, a former Commissioner for Finance in Abia State, Chief Richard Harrison and the President of Umuahia Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture, UCCIMA Chief Chidi Nkem Aruoma, who x-rayed the positive impact of small businesses in the society, maintained that Small businesses have succeeded in feeding the various communities and have also employed nearly half of the society’s workforce.
They observed that Small Business Saturday was a term coined by American Express in 2010 as a way to encourage customers to direct some of their dollars they were spending at big box stores to small, local shops.
Harrison, who is also the Chairman of a Charity Organization known as Harrison Goodness Foundation, HGF appreciated the Federal Government’s efforts at boosting small businesses, which formed its integral part of economic reform agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration.
The former Commissioner for Finance who further commended the Federal Government Loan Scheme for Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises and Manufacturing Enterprises, said that the government’s target at the MSMEs with its intervention programmes must be applauded as MSMEs has remain the engine of the Nigerian economy.Also the President of UCCIMA, Chief Chidi Nkem Aruoma, maintained that MSMEs has collectively employed over 80 percent of the nation’s labour force, and has contribute nearly half of the national GDP.
Pix: Chief Chidi Nkem Aruoma.
Records available have it that American Express founded Small Business Saturday in 2010 to get more customers into small businesses the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
Every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the Shop Small movement energizes small business owners to prepare for customers in every way possible. That includes the traditional brick-and-mortar customer and the online shopper. The single-day event continues to grow each year.