The study is aimed at evaluating the extent to which Micro finance banks have helped in financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria, how they access funds from the micro finance banks to finance their productions and how these accessed funds affect their performances. The study covered a period of ten year from 2003-2013. The data used were both primary and secondary data generated from questionnaires and annual report of 300 randomly selected small and medium scale enterprises that have accessed funds from micro finance banks in Nigeria. These data were statistically analyzed based on the research hypothesis using regression analysis as a tool to determine the relationship between the variables considered. The results show strong evidence that access to microfinance significantly enhance growth of small and medium enterprises in Nigeria. This means that the operation of microfinance banks is an impetus for the performance and growth of small and medium enterprises. However, other firm level variables such as business size, business age, business location, loan size, loan maturity etc. are found to have positive effect on enterprises’ growth. Therefore, this study recommends among other things a recapitalization of the microfinance banks to enhance their lending capacity to support small and medium business growth and expansion.
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