This paper identified crucial factors influencing the growth and development of entrepreneurship activity and specific role
of entrepreneurship activity at ameliorating the burden of poverty, among people in Lagos State, Nigeria. It addresses
specific causal factors, indices of poverty and unemployment and proffered panacea to the identified problems.
The choice of Lagos State was purposive because of its disposition as the commercial nucleus centre of the country. A multi-
stage sampling procedure was adopted to get a sample size of 250 respondents. Descriptive statistics (such as frequency
counts, percentages and means) were used to summarise and describe the data.
The findings reveal that entrepreneurial activities absorbs unemployed labour and reduces the dependency ratio of working
class. It was also evident that optimum positive derivatives of entrepreneurship was not realized because of inherent
problems of non-availability of accessible credit facilities and lack of multi-functional continuum of support to
entrepreneurs.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Poverty, Development, Growth, Unemployment.