62% Of Small Firms Earn Less Than N300,000 Monthly – Report

More than half (62 per cent) of small businesses in Nigeria earn a median monthly revenue lower than N300,000 while 47 per cent earn lower than N200,000, a new small firms diaries report has said.

The report which got its findings from 163 small firms across three states namely Enugu, Lagos and Kaduna, where surveys were conducted over the course of a 12-month period between August 2021 and August 2022.

Published by Michelle Kempis global research manager at

Financial Access Initiative (FAI)  Research Center of New York University and Timothy Ogden, managing director FAI in partnership with the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics and the Lagos Business School, the report aims to better understand small firms in low income neighbourhoods of developing countries.

“Our qualitative work provides little to no evidence that the

volatility of revenue is planned, desired or predictable. A major theme of the small firm diaries, therefore, is the challenges that firms encounter managing this amount of volatility,” the report said.

It added that firms’ monthly median operating margin was N78,575 and that of all firms, 93 per cent (151) had positive monthly median margins while most firms had positive operating margins, their margins are slim.