With Momentum, organisations can track changes qualitatively, quantitatively, focus and target impact to maximum capacity

 

On June 17, 2026, Enterprise Trade and Knowledge (ETK), a United Kingdom-based international trade and economic development advisory firm, marked the global launch of Momentum, its latest product, in Lagos.

The rollout of the technology enabled capacity, climate risk and impact management platform was delivered in partnership with the UK Deputy High Commission in Lagos, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE).

In this interview, Bolaji Sofoluwe, managing director, ETK and Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), shares with OBINNA EMELIKE, the relevance of the platform to organisations, rationale behind it, reason for the global rollout in Lagos, benefits, possible partnerships, and related issues, Excerpt.

For those who are meeting you for the first time, who is Bolaji Sofoluwe?

My name is Bolaji Sofoluwe MBE. I am the founder and manager director of Enterprise Trade and Knowledge (ETK) Group. It is a United Kingdom-based international trade and economic development advisory firm specialising in export development, market entry, and international market engagement across Africa and other high growth emerging markets.

Why are you here in Lagos?

Well, I think I will start by saying that I have had an office in this country since 2013. So, well, we now have two; one in Abuja, and another one in Lagos, since 2013.

I am not one of those diasporas that only come when they feel like it. I have been heavily investing in Nigeria for a long time.

What is the Momentum platform all about?

I am sure you guys hear about workshops, accelerators, consultant after consultant, and training after training. You hear about all of these things, but what change are they actually making in the organisations that they are delivering to? Can we track that change so that maybe we don’t need another workshop or another training, or maybe we need more in a particular area? And that is exactly what Momentum does.

Momentum is able to track the changes qualitatively and quantitatively so that you can actually focus and target the impact that you are trying to make in those organisations to its maximum capacity.

As a UK company, why are you flagging off the global launch of Momentum, your latest product, in Lagos?

Fair enough. I was born in England. So, why Lagos? Because apart from the fact that this is a home territory for me as founder of ETK, it is also where we have some existing clients where we are actually running these programmes with.

And it has always been a starting point for us. In 2013, we launched ETK Africa in Lagos. Since then, we have done projects in 34 countries.

Lagos is a hub of business. But absolutely, it is a great launchpad. Lagos is a great launchpad. Everybody knows it.

How is Momentum deployed by organisations that buy into it?

So, Momentum is essentially designed for organisations that want to start intentionally tracking that change. We cannot really do much about what happened in the past, but we can change the way we look at technical assistance for the future.

So, how exactly are we designing those technical assistance programmes? How exactly are we tracking the change that they are making? That can start from any point in time, and we are starting now. ETK has been doing this on some of our programmes here in Nigeria, where the organisation starts from one point, and we start to see the changes that take place in that organisation. And we start to see how it improves their opportunities to get more funding, or maybe access to international markets.

We are able to sell international productivity, scaling up, and employing people into the organisation. So, growing, and even now sharing that knowledge with other organisations within their ecosystem is really important to us.

Do you have specific focal points, like changes in finance, HR administration, among others to address with Momentum?

You are actually a Momentum ambassador already. So, we have seven functional areas that we are tracking, but organisations can tell us where their priorities are. We track governance and leadership. We track finance management, HR and people management, as well as climate resilience, which not many organisations are tracking. We always think climate resilience is something for them to discuss at COP 22, 23, 24. But actually, it is affecting us now. Sometimes you are going out to do an event, or you are going to meet a client, and it is flooding. There is flooding on the streets. That is an effect of climate change.

As a business, how are you going to adapt to that? And it is all of those things that we are tracking, those individual parts of the organisation that make it a whole.

For instance, one of our projects involves one million farmers in 10 states in northern Nigeria. We are tracking where they are, where they are located, what the inherent risks are, whether it is flooding, whether it is drought, whether it is a heat wave. Those are the risks that will directly affect their yield, and therefore directly affect their income.

But if they know in advance, they can actually make some changes to adapt so that that particular climate event does not affect their livelihood. That is the idea behind it. It is not just about knowing about climate change and the rest of it.

It is really about knowing how it affects those individual businesses and the changes that they are making to prevent themselves from going out of business entirely.

Considering that Nigerian companies are a bit slow at adaptation of technology and changes, how are you going to get them to buy into Momentum?

Well, this is the thing with Momentum. They have realised outcomes from taking part in the activities, for instance, access to markets.

If you are now able to sell into an international market you wouldn’t have had access to because of the fact that you didn’t have the right structure in place, then that is a win for you. I will give you an example. Sometime ago in Kenya, we were trying to sell snow peas into Aldi, which is a huge supermarket chain in Europe. The individuals that were selling the snow peas didn’t have certain practices in place that matched global standards. So, they were unable to sell that to Aldi. What we had to do was several iterations of transformation.

I am not talking about training. Training is different and it is needed. But transformation is when you actually see that the instruction is changing the way the organisation runs.

That was what we had to do and before you knew it, from selling only 2000-euro worth of snow peas locally, they were selling 20,000-euro a week. You can imagine the big difference that has made to the organisation.

When you come to them and say, all of this is part of what will help you get to this end, then they have that buy-in. You can’t just go to them and tell them it Is another tick box exercise.

Do you think Momentum will be relevant in sustaining and reviving generational businesses in Nigeria?

You have just nailed it. It is spot on. What is the difference between a Guinness and an Elizade? The difference is that Guinness is intentional about its internal structures and its practices that go beyond the founders. Mr. Guinness, who founded Guinness in Ireland many years ago, has been dead a long time.

But Guinness continues to exist. It is not because Mr. Guinness is better than Nigeria’s Elizade Group founder or whatever. It is because they have intentionally put these structures in place. And trust me, once we have this and apply excellence to things in Africa, we will blow. I really think that this is going to be the game changer for organisations here in Nigeria that buy into it.

Do you see Momentum helping to curb corruption and also partnering with the anti-graft agencies here?

We probably should. It is a great idea and something we can think about banking ourselves onto.

But at the moment, we need to look at the business, and the needs of the businesses. They want to scale, they want more investment, and they want to be in the market. How do you do that? We need to create these structures within the business and we need to be able to track it.

What is the point in me, Bolaji, giving this business a grant of a hundred thousand to improve this in their business and then Mr. B comes and gives another grant to improve the same thing. What is the point? But Momentum will allow you to know what has been improved, what changed, to ensure accountability and wastage. Based on the above, maybe you don’t need to do that, or maybe you need to do something else.

So, that is the whole point. About $USD 8 billion is spent annually on technical assistance in Africa alone, every year.

My colleague was saying that it is eight Lagos-Calabar coastal roads, spent on technical assistance every year. It is a lot of money.

Why are we not seeing the Guinnesses of Africa? It is because it is repetitive and most of the time layered in places where it is not needed at all.

Are you also going to market Momentum to the public sector?

I would absolutely love to.

I mean, I would love to market to the public sector in the UK, let alone over here because the government becomes big and inefficiencies start to happen. So, in the same way, even here, we have several multiple agencies and the government is big. What we would like to see is how the government can become more efficient and maybe even shrink a little bit to the benefit of the taxpayers as well as the government workers themselves.