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Entrepreneurial activities can be affected by shocks including pandemics. Our study aims at exploring the channels through which Covid-19 pandemic and associated government responses affected entrepreneurial activities, and the opportunities that were created, accessed or utilised in response to the Pandemic. We identified six of these channels. The adverse impact of the Pandemic and different government responses to the Pandemic on economic growth caused the Pandemic to impact more on entrepreneurship. Growth contraction had implications on aggregate demand, expectations of future incomes especially for informal and small businesses, values of assets, and investment levels. However, the Pandemic presented some utilised, unutilised and partially utilised opportunities for entrepreneurship and our study notes that a critical juncture was truncated and wasted by Nigerians because unutilised opportunities included investment in R&D, hospitals and medical supplies, ICT and online businesses.

We assessed the differential effects of social expenditures on males and females by establishing the impact of public expenditures on education and health on gender parity in primary and secondary enrollment and on gender parity in life expectancy for Nigeria given age dependency ratio, annual population growth rate, and GDP per capita growth rate. We found that increased social spending on health and education increased female education enrollment which was hitherto lower than male enrollment. Again, increased social expenditure on health and education improved male life expectancy which was hitherto lower than female life expectancy. We established the importance of increased social expenditure on health and education; gender budgeting and gender-sensitive budgets; and implementation of inclusive growth policies in engendering gender parity in Nigeria.