ACADEMIA Letters
Global crises, SMEs, and entrepreneurship: the need for a
new agenda for the future
Kalani Kiriveldeniya
H.S.R. Rosairo
The Covid-19 global pandemic situation put the global economy in a crisis while many of
the nations were sufering from unfavourable events such as extreme weather, climate change,
unstable economics, political instability, and even terrorism. The situation caused loss of
millions of human lives and disrupted livelihoods. Prolonged locked-down situations due
to Covid-19 recently put everyone in predicament of fulflling their basic needs and wants.
Continuous lockdowns worsened the situation which severely afected both the physical and
mental wellbeing of the people and even deprived them of their basic human rights. These
continuous past and present threats on human wellbeing which afected at national, regional,
and even at global levels, have opened up a common platform for the world leaders of the
United Nations (UN) to take action at every and possible level to become resilient and adaptive
towards such situations. The UN has addressed these global threats through their Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) which will be the watershed blueprint of peace and prosperity
for people and the planet, now and in the future. The 2030 agenda on global challenge for
government transparency and SDGs included a total of seventeen goals of which No Poverty,
Zero Hunger and Climate Action are considered in this article as especially important for the
developing countries as these are prominent issues to be addressed by the developing world.
The SMEs have been defned by Bayraktar and Algan (2019) as frms with 200 or less
employees. Their contribution and the importance to the world economies have been well
researched. They are important for developing and developed economies alike. The World
bank (WB) (2021) confrmed that the SMEs represent around 90 per cent of businesses and
over 50 per cent of the employment worldwide. The WB estimates that the formal SMEs
contribute to around 40 per cent of national income (in GDP terms) in emerging economies.
Academia Letters, February 2022
Corresponding Author: Kalani Kiriveldeniya, kalani.kiriveldeniya@agri.sab.ac.lk
Citation: Kiriveldeniya, K., Rosairo, H. (2022). Global crises, SMEs, and entrepreneurship: the need for a new
agenda for the future. Academia Letters, Article 4854. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4854.
1
©2022 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0