MTN Nigeria and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria are scaling the mySMEville platform with an ambition to onboard 5 million Nigerian MSMEs over the next 24 months, as the country’s annual MSME financing gap widens to an estimated $158 billion.
The platform, formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding signed in November 2025, has already grown from a 200-business pilot in Lagos to over 2,600 businesses nationwide by May 2026 — a pace that has drawn international interest, including a formal study visit from Angola’s national MSME agency.
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What mySMEville does
The platform functions as a single digital entry point for Nigeria’s nearly 40 million MSMEs, built around four core pillars: information, funding, infrastructure, and markets. Through the mySMEville Academy, entrepreneurs access structured business training and digital skills programmes. E-commerce integrations give businesses access to online selling channels, while infrastructure support includes access to solar energy solutions and other operational tools that small businesses in underserved areas typically cannot afford independently.
The funding component connects businesses to financing opportunities, grants, and investor networks that would otherwise require multiple platforms and relationships to access separately. The goal is to reduce the fragmentation that has historically made it difficult for Nigerian SMEs to find, use, and benefit from the support that exists.
80 per cent of Nigerian MSMEs currently operate informally, and only 3.9 per cent access formal credit. mySMEville is not just a digital platform — it is an attempt to make the formal economy feel accessible enough that businesses actually want to enter it.
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Why the Angola visit matters
The delegation from Angola’s INAPEM, led by Chairman Bráulio Augusto, visited MTN’s headquarters in Abuja in May 2026 specifically to study the Nigeria model with a view to adapting it for Angola’s own MSME support ecosystem. Augusto described the public-private partnership structure as the key insight he would take home, noting that it demonstrated what becomes possible when government and private sector align around a shared platform.
The international attention reflects something important: mySMEville is being watched not just as a Nigerian initiative but as a potential continental blueprint for how technology companies and development agencies can collaborate at scale to support small business ecosystems.
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The road ahead
SMEDAN Director-General Charles Odii described the partnership as a formidable force for economic progress. Over the next 24 months, the growth plan focuses on integrating advanced learning systems into the academy, driving national policy reform to simplify business registration, and building the kind of digital infrastructure that allows informal businesses to formalise and become visible to the credit and market access they need.
For Nigerian entrepreneurs, the promise of mySMEville is straightforward: one platform, every resource, no middleman. Whether it delivers at 5 million businesses the same impact it has shown at 2,600 is the question the next two years will answer.
