Category Archives: Tony Elumelu Foundation

Entrepreneurs get support from UBA Foundation and Kenya’s Youth Fund

The UBA Foundation and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund in Kenya have signed a partnership to support Kenyan entrepreneurs who participate in the fourth cycle of the Tony Elumelu Foundation entrepreneurship development program.

The UBA Foundation is the CSR arm of the UBA Group, a pan-African bank that is in 19 countries. It focuses on economic empowerment, education, and the environment, while the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship program is a flagship of the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) . The program is an investment of $100 million that aims to nurture 10,000 African startups to create 1 million jobs and generate $10 billion in revenue growth over ten years. This will be through funding, training, mentorship, counseling and networking for the startups to trade across Africa and beyond.

Entrepreneurs apply to the TEF and Youth Fund.

The CEO of the Youth Fund Josiah Moriasi said the organization had advanced Kshs 12.2 billion to 1.4 million Kenyans through their core products such as LPO financing, talanta loans (for creatives), and startup loans. Ronald Osumba, Chairman of the Youth Fund, said that while the Fund had been in the news for some wrong reasons, it had also supported many young successful people,  not just with finance, but also business support, market linkages, and business spaces.  They were also working to reduce the failure rate of startups through market aggregation models in counties around the country.

This year the TEF program is already seeing a record number of entries from 54 countries since the window for applications opened on January 1.   It runs up to March 1, 2018, for applicants to submit their startups or business ideas and the selected entrepreneurs  will participate in the 2018 cycle that runs from May 1 to December 2018. 

The Tony Elumelu Foundation program has 3,000 alumni now, and over 200 Kenyans have benefited from the program, each having received $5,000 (~Kshs 500,000) as seed capital for their businesses which they have then used to scale and grow into other product and service lines. This year, UBA Kenya officials hope to enroll more Kenyan in the program as the country has run a distant second to Nigeria in past applications and enrollment.

The application process is rigorous but it pays off. TEF entrepreneurs get twelve weeks of training, mentorship, $5,000 of seed capital and access to the alumni network and further funding opportunities.  Kenyan entrepreneurs who complete the application to the TEF site can also apply to the Youth Fund for another $5,000 in matched funding.

TEF Forum 2016 Part II

Tony Elumelu, a Nigerian businessman is considered one of the most influential business people in Africa. He’s been an advocate for seed financing and angel investing for entrepreneurship across the continent, something that he’s dubbed “Africapitalism” and advances this through the Tony Elumelu Foundation entrepreneurship program that has seven pillars including mentorship, online resources, the annual forum, seed capital funding, and an alumni network.

Dr. Awele Elumelu and Tony ElumeluAt a Q&A session during the 2016 forum in Lagos, Elumelu spoke of his desire to expand the awareness of the program which currently has applicants skewed in Anglophone African countries (Nigeria had almost 1/3 of the applicants, followed by Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana). He said he’d been asked in France if this meant anglophone countries were more entrepreneurial but he said they were more aware of the program, and that he wanted to see more Francophone and North African participation in the program

He also spoke of his desire to grow the program even larger through partnerships with other organizations, one of which is the African Development Bank to match, and therefore double,  the number of fellows that the program is supporting.

Parminder Vir, the CEO of the Foundation also said that the 6-year-old organization would be  rebranding several aspects of the two-year fellowship program and that all initiatives will be realigned under the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF). So there will be the TEF  entrepreneurship capital management , TEF entrepreneurship hub, and TEF research & advocacy etc.

 TEF Forum at the Nigeria Law SchoolVir said they had also built a platform to link partners and the diaspora with the entrepreneurs and which can be vital to the program (e.g. Nigeria get $62 billion from the USA in remittance). She asked entrepreneurs to engage on the unique social network (not facebook or snapchat) as the platform is unique for investors thought leaders, partners, funders –  VCs, PEs, Angels who want to come to Africa and now would now have access to 65,000 entrepreneurs in the  54 countries who were  pipeline of bankable investments, and 2,000 have who had already received advanced entrepreneurship training.

Already the entrepreneurs who are diverse sectors, use the platform to share their stories, engage each other, network, market to each other, pose and get solutions to problems they face. This platform also forms valuable data for research and trends and they will be producing more research reports to market to the diaspora and potential partners.

The largest sector of those supported in the 2006 cohort are in agriculture (27%) followed by fashion/clothing and ICT, and about 1/3 are women. Vir said they were committed to supporting 20-40% of agri-entrepreneurs every year and this was echoed by other participants including former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo.

The next class admission class to the Tony Elumelu entrepreneurship program will start in  January 2017.

TEF Forum 2016

The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) staged its 2nd entrepreneurship forum on October 28-29 in Lagos, Nigeria. Billed as the largest gathering of African entrepreneurs, it featured 5,000 young attendees who were recipients  of funding and support from the Foundation through its TEF Entrepreneurship Program.

TEF Forum 2016

TEF Forum 2016

The meetup is one of the support structures under the TEF Entrepreneurship Program‘s 10-year, $100 million commitment, which aims to find, fund and support 10,000 entrepreneurs across Africa over ten years. In the first year, they had 26,000 applications, and for these second they got 45,000 from every African country and selected 1,000 who are eligible to receive up to $10,000 to implement their business plans.

The attendees got lessons in entrepreneurship from business, financial and international leaders and other mentors and partners in the program, on things like raising capital and getting started in their ideas, generating revenue and making their companies bankable through efficient financial processes, how to build structures so that companies can survive beyond their founders (“business in your head has to be decrypted so it can last 100 years”  – said the UBA CEO) and on how to live within their means.

They were also startled to see and hear from past recipients including one farmer from Uganda who’s won a  $70,000 NGO order, and a Gambian entrepreneur who’s gone from earning  $20,000 to $2 million in sales through exports of mangoes and groundnuts. Also, some of the suppliers at  the event such as the caterer were past recipients of funding and support from the program.