The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), in partnership with the Integrity Organisation/Convention on Business Integrity (CBi) and the United Nations Global Compact Network Nigeria (UNGC Network Nigeria), has announced the launch of an anti-corruption and corporate governance standards project to enable Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to easily manage their businesses.
In a statement, it said the project is aimed at setting standards for corporate governance, ethics and sustainability to guide the direction, control and management of SMEs in Nigeria while enhancing their competitiveness.
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The statement noted that achieving long-term success and value creation responsibly and sustainability for SMEs is important since it is estimated that SMEs constitute 96% of businesses in Nigeria.
“These enterprises are largely poorly governed, making it difficult to secure the capital needed for growth. Moreover, Nigeria’s challenging business environment creates pressure to adopt practises where complacency, shortcuts, corruption, nepotism, and discrimination flourish.
“These practices create a cyclical effect, compromising SMEs’ ability to achieve and sustain high-performance outcomes, hobbling their ability to source funds, and eroding their capacity to compete in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and beyond.”
It added that the project intends to change the present narrative by using a data-driven approach to develop a replicable and scalable framework to enhance good corporate governance practices that would lead to a value creation strategy for all SMEs in Nigeria and increase their competitiveness, survival, growth, and succession.
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