Millennium development goals and entrepreneurial skill development in Nigeria: The role of microfinance banks

In September 2000, leaders from 189 nations ratified the Millennium Declaration. The declaration is an unprecedented global commitment and one of the most significant United Nations documents of recent time. It offers a common and integrated vision on how to tackle some of the major challenges facing the world. The declaration has resulted in eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) focused on reducing poverty, improving the quality of peoples’ lives, ensuring environmental sustainability, and building partnerships to ensure that globalization becomes a more positive force for all the world’s people. Specific targets and indicators have been set for each of the goals, to be achieved by 2015. These goals might remain elusive unless much emphasis is laid on the development of entrepreneurial skills. Entrepreneurs can provide the new approaches needed to hasten the process of reducing poverty and hunger. This paper shows that while the MDGs do not formally set targets for financial sector, Nigeria needs microfinance to empower the skilled economically active poor through an integrated microfinance model in order to achieve the MDGs.