A Contextual Evaluation of Small and Medium Enterprise Activities and Business Growth Indicators in A Nigeria University Market

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are commonly accepted as a key driver of local economic growth. Still, their development is typically determined by singular financial results, rather than systematically evaluated by multidimensional indicators. This paper formulated and implemented a contextualized model of evaluation of enterprise development in a constrained University market setting. A descriptive evaluation design was adopted by the use of operators in the BOUESTI Campus main market, Ikere- Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria. The SME Activity and Growth Indicator Scale (SAGIS) was used to collect data on 147 SME owners using a structured questionnaire aimed at measuring operational activities and business growth related to the latter as latent constructs. The content validity was determined by reviewing the experts, and the internal consistency reliability was determined by the use of Cronbach's alpha. The degree of enterprise activities and development indicators was identified through descriptive statistics, and the predictive role of the operational activities in business development was analyzed using regression analysis. Two crucial questions shaped the research: how SMEs drive economic growth in the region, and who the key players in the process are. It was discovered that the process of enterprise development in the campus market is multidimensional; SMEs play an important role in the provision of employment, skill development, income generation, and value-added services in the area. SME activities were identified to be doing well in businesses like tailoring, food vending, barbing, ICT services, and trading. The study concludes that SMEs continue to play a critical role in grassroots development and proposes policies that will facilitate training, credit access,x and infrastructure to guarantee the sustainability and scalability of SMEs and performance evaluation of enterprises in comparable academic settings.