Elumelu: 3 years of empowering African entrepreneurs through TEF

On Wednesday, March 22, the Tony Elumelu Foundation released the list of 1,000 entrepreneurs from across Africa who would form the 2017 class of its annual Entrepreneurship Programme.
The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme is a $100-million, 10-year project with a clear objective to identify 10,000 African start-ups and entrepreneurs with ideas that have the potential to succeed and provide them with business skills training, mentorship, seed capital funding, information and access to a vast network of African entrepreneurs.
The programme has been adjudged Africa’s largest business incubator, with its $100 million commitment being the largest endowment in Africa focused on entrepreneurship development. President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone at last year’s Entrepreneurship Forum described it as “a genuinely innovative approach to philanthropy in Africa”.
This year brings to 3,000 the number of those who have benefitted from the programme in three years. More than 93,000 entrepreneurs from across 55 African countries submitted applications this year. That figure exceeds by over 100 percent the about 45,000 applications recorded in 2016 and nearly quadruples the over 20,000 applications received at the programme’s debut in 2015. This goes to show the growing interest in entrepreneurship in Africa.
Interestingly, 50 percent of the 2017 cohort comes from Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, followed by regional powerhouses Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Cameroon in that order.
An analysis of the 2017 list shows that agriculture led the pack with nearly 1 in 3 successful applicants active in this sector, followed by ICT (11 percent), and then manufacturing (9 percent). This is some piece of good news for Africa for two reasons. One, it signals that African youths are indeed interested in feeding the continent. Two, it points to a paradigm shift away from extractives to a more sustainable mindset that embraces industrialisation and diversification.
That shift is what Tony Elumelu, chairman, Heirs Holdings, chairman, United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc, and founder, Tony Elumelu Foundation, has been advocating.
As Elumelu told Siki Mgabadeli, award-winning South African financial journalist, television presenter and producer, in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, “The new narrative should go from Africa rising to Africa industrialising. Let’s begin to industrialise Africa, we have the population, our population is a huge dividend for us but we need to mine that dividend very well so that it will be for the benefit of everyone. The African story must go beyond the commodity story, we must begin to delink our economies from…if the oil price goes up today then we are doing well, and if they go down then we are not doing well. We need to industrialise so that we can create local value addition, which will help our extension.”
And who are better positioned to lead this paradigm shift than Africa’s youthful entrepreneurs? This is perhaps why Elumelu reposes so much hope on them to act as catalysts for Africa’s economic renaissance.
“I believe in entrepreneurship and what I see in the faces of the young Africans who I interact with is these are energetic people, highly enterprising, very brilliant people and people who don’t want to take no for an answer, and people who want to succeed, and people who see their success as success for the community and the continent. But they need help and they need support,” he told Mgabadeli at Davos.
And he has in the last three years continued to provide massive support to African entrepreneurs through the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme. The impact of this support, no doubt, has been massive.
Parminder Vir, CEO, Tony Elumelu Foundation, says of the programme’s impact in three short years: “We recently sampled 600 of our existing 2,000 entrepreneurs to understand the extent of our Programme’s impact. We discovered that they have turned our investment into real returns with 1,297 jobs created so far.”
During the Entrepreneurship Forum last year, Elumelu shared the story of Momarr Mass Taal, CEO of Tropingo Foods, whom he said has turned his first $5,000 seed capital received from the Foundation in 2015 into a $1.2 million revenue business. There are numerous other success stories.
But even amid this success, there is evidence that more needs to be done. Consider that for every 1,000 successful applicants each year, several thousands of others are left behind. This year, for instance, there are 92,000 aspiring entrepreneurs with brilliant business ideas who have been unsuccessful.
“These young African men and women have demonstrated passion, innovation and creativity in their applications and we should not relent until we help them ALL realize their aspirations. I call on other well-endowed Africans and friends of Africa to support us to do more,” Elumelu said while announcing this year’s successful entrepreneurs.
But beyond the call for support, the Foundation is additionally identifying and advocating for policy reforms to enable not just the Elumelu entrepreneurs but all African entrepreneurs with the will to succeed.
“This will eliminate a lot of the corruption or dependency on political largesse to successfully start and operate a business. And they are hungry for it,” he said in a keynote speech at the 2016 annual Harvard International Development Conference (HIDC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It was Gamaliel Bailey, the late American journalist, editor and publisher, who once said, “Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy; we do not value the sun for its height, but for its use.”
But philanthropy, in the form of just doling out cash, while it may solve a temporary problem, does not have meaningful, sustainable impact. It amounts to merely giving a man fish rather than teaching him how to fish, as the old cliché goes.
This is precisely why Naveen K. Jain, founder and former CEO of InfoSpace, says, “Philanthropy is not about giving money but about solving problems. While well-meaning, the idea of writing a check and calling it ‘philanthropy’ is extremely short-sighted and unfortunately, extremely pervasive.”
It is this conviction that true philanthropy requires a disruptive mindset, innovative thinking and a philosophy driven by entrepreneurial insights and creative opportunities that drives Tony Elumelu’s passion “to ensure shared prosperity in African economic development and opportunity” by empowering young Africans to be self-sufficient; it is the driving force behind Africapitalism, the realisation that the private sector, especially in Africa, has a key role to play in developing the continent through investment in key sectors that can help to catalyse the economy, create economic prosperity and social benefits for everyone; it is at the core of the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme.
PS: Tony Elumelu turned 54 on March 22, 2017, the same day his Foundation released the list of 1,000 entrepreneurs for the 2017 edition of its annual Entrepreneurship Programme. This is wishing this great economist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist happy birthday and many happy returns.

CHUKS OLUIGBO