FATE Foundation’s AEP turns out 400 entrepreneurs, 2,000 jobs

FATE Foundation Port Harcourt centre, a private sector led not-for-profit organisation’s Aspiring Entrepreneurs Programme (AEP), an intensive hands-on business and entrepreneurial empowerment plan, has turned out over 400 budding entrepreneurs from states in the oil producing Niger Delta region in 11 years.

Within the same period the outfit’s AEP association alumni have through their business outfits created more than 2,000 jobs, with over 80 percent of these small businesses now self-sustaining.

These, among others, emerged in Port Harcourt when FATE Foundation inducted its 33rd association alumni at the UNIPORT Business School, Port Harcourt.

Kalada Apiafi, renowned SME business consultant and board chairman of FATE Foundation Port Harcourt, while taking the new inductees on some business success tips, spoke on ‘Networking as a Tool for Business Success’.

He encouraged them to build, maintain, and nourish their networks, which consists of their ‘entire stream of relationships’, telling them that “your success (in business and life) would be based on the number of useful people (network) you know”. And that “your network strength can lead to your success in life”.

Apiafi, who is also the managing director of Wider Perspectives Limited, a foremost Port Harcourt based international consulting firm, reminded the FATE tutored entrepreneurs to ensure to promote themselves via their businesses and make themselves relevant within the Nigerian budding 1.2 million small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) space. So that in the near future they would be numbered among some of the nation’s flourishing SMEs, creating employments for thousands of young people.

While Tunde Salihu, himself a FATE AEP trainee, and now into biscuit business, informed the young entrepreneurs to explore the option of joining the impending FATE Foundation Cooperative Society in order to leverage on access to cheap capital to expand their businesses.