EMBRACING THE SPIRIT OF AFRICAPITALISM: CATALYSING … – The Tony Elumelu Foundation

About the Tony Elumelu Foundation

The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) was established in 2010 by Mr Tony O. Elumelu, CFR, leading African investor, philanthropist, Africapitalist and former Chief Executive Officer of the United Bank for Africa which he now chairs. It has become the leading philanthropic organisation dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs and enhancing entrepreneurship in Africa, with the objectives of driving poverty eradication, ensuring job creation across the continent, and improving womens economic empowerment.

The Foundation believes in the critical role of the private sector in Africas development and has dedicated all efforts toward its landmark Entrepreneurship Programme since 2015. The Programme was launched with USD 100 million of Mr Elumelus personal wealth, to train, mentor, and fund 10,000 African entrepreneurs in 10 years. This USD 100 million fund has been used to provide financial support to more than 18,000 aspiring entrepreneurs across all 54 African countries, in addition to providing mentorship and key business skills training to hundreds of thousands more.

Mr Elumelu envisioned creating a philanthropic entity that catalyses pan-African economic prosperity. His philosophy of Africapitalism is grounded in the belief that a vibrant private sector holds the key to the continents economic and social prosperity, and that the development of a strong, sustainable small and medium enterprise (SME) sector will support the solutions to major challenges including rising youth unemployment, mass migration and systemic poverty.

To achieve this vision, after lengthy discussions on potential funding and programmatic models at Board and senior stakeholder level, in 2015 the Foundation moved away from a traditional model of supporting individual scholarships and incubators and became solely focused on empowering young African entrepreneurs with seed capital and extended business development support. After a successful start from 2015-2016, the programme saw even more tremendous growth in demand from 2017 onward. Yet, resource constraints limited the Foundations ability to support the number of applicants they received, with growing concern at senior levels of the organisation about whether their new model could actually serve the vast needs of African entrepreneurs. By 2021, the programme was receiving over 400,000 applicants each year for USD 5,000 seed funding grants. It became abundantly clear to Tony Elumelu himself, and to the wider leadership team, that they must do something differently to meet this demand and achieve an even more scaled impact.

Seeking to create a larger, more holistic structure to support African entrepreneurs, the Foundation asked themselves a series of questions before taking steps forward:

The insights they gained from considering these questions were then used as the basis for a range of actions:

We are intentional about creating a completely inclusive programme and accommodating socio-cultural diversities across Africa. Without this, we cannot have success.

18,000+ new enterprises launched and advanced across Africa since 2015.

77% of TEF-funded entrepreneurs from the recent cohort now generate revenue.

60% of TEFs 2021 funding cohort employ up to 5 people each in their businesses, 26% employ 6-10 employees, 9% employ 11-20 people, and 3% have a staff of more than 21+.

4,000 volunteer global mentors now support the development of SME entrepreneurs through TEF.

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EMBRACING THE SPIRIT OF AFRICAPITALISM: CATALYSING ... - The Tony Elumelu Foundation