ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES IN THE GAMBIA: A CONCEPTUAL EXPOSITION OF THE NEDI EXPERIENCE

Abstract

The biggest challenge of youth and women in developing countries like The Gambia is lack of empowerment to 
generate income from gainful employment and or enterprise. National Enterprise Development Initiative (NEDi) 
was thus expected to provide lending services, entrepreneurial training services and marketing and linkages services 
to empower youths and women to overcome their challenges helping in creating job opportunities and reducing 
unemployment rates as a result of growth of their enterprises. This paper assesses the roles of the National 
Enterprise Development Initiative (NEDI), especially its programmes and impact in line with policy on enterprise 
and entrepreneurship development. This is with specific reference to employment creation and the uptake of 
entrepreneurial pursuits amongst the youth and women in The Gambia. It finds that under plausible assumptions, 
extreme poverty will not be eradicated by NEDi, but it can be reduced to low levels due to NEDi’s small scale of 
activities, low level of sustainable empowerment, employment opportunities and income generation can be achieved 
especially in the rural areas. Overall NEDi assessment reveals that the scope covered by NEDI was generally 
limited. It was established that NEDi loans/grants enhance growth of individually owned youth enterprises through 
increase of sales volumes, profitability, product diversification, customer base growth and conferring competitive 
edge to recipients over their competitors. It was also established that entrepreneurship training services offered by 
NEDi enhance record keeping skills, customer care skills (although knowledge of soft skills could be an added 
advantage), increasing sales volumes, understanding of their business, conferring business management skills, 
increasing profitability and general growth of individually owned youth enterprises. It was further found out that 
marketing and linkage support services provided by NEDi enhance sales, product marketing, customer base growth, 
product diversification and discovery of new markets for individually owned youth enterprises.