Entrepreneurship Financing and Nation Building in Nigeria: Evidence from Agricultural Small and Medium Scale Enterprises

An attempt has been made in this study to examine the relationship between entrepreneurship financing from the perspective of agricultural small and medium scale enterprises and nation building in Nigeria from 1990 to 2017. Data were collected from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin with the application of Autoregressive Distributed Lagged and Bounds test to address the objective of the study. The following are the findings that emerged in this study; agriculture and forestry business financing and gross domestic product growth rate have an insignificant negative relationship. There is a negative relationship between mining and quarrying business financing and GDP growth rate, but the relationship is significant at 10 percent level of significance. Meanwhile, broad money supply and GDP growth rate have a significant positive relationship. Therefore, this study makes the following recommendations to the policy makers in Nigeria. Firstly, if the Nigerian government wants to embark on meaningful nation building, financing of agriculture and forestry, mining and quarrying SMEs should be given urgent priority in the country. In the same vein, the authorities of Central Bank of Nigeria should as a matter of urgency regulate commercial banks to channel substantial amount of their credits towards agricultural SMEs in affordable and sustainable manners.