Sustaining Tony Elumelu’s entrepreneurship model

Most African adults believe that the young demography in the continent is either an opportunity or a ‘ticking time bomb’.

They argue that the young energy in Africa can become a catalyst for building the continent. With 200 million people between the ages of 15 and 24, according to the United Nations data, African adults say that the continent already has the human resources needed to build infrastructure, if well harnessed and trained.

Apart from infrastructure, the population is a big market and can become an entrepreneurship hub as well as an endpoint for good leadership.

However, they also argue that if nothing is done to engage the young population, the continent could become the criminal epicentre of the world.

The UN data show that 46 percent of African youth live on less than $1 per day, a figure seen as an acute or chronic poverty. In fact, data from various countries of Africa show that they are worse-off now that they were at their independence from colonial masters.

An International Labour Organisation report in August show that working poverty rates among youth in Sub-Saharan Africa is almost 70 per cent in 2016, which translates to 64.4 million working youth in the region living in extreme or moderate poverty.  One in every four working youth in North Africa lives in extreme or moderate poverty in 2016. This means that many young Africans who work are extremely poor, because their employers do not pay them what is called the living wage, defined as wage high enough to maintain a normal standard of living.

Fifty percent of the 10 million graduates produced by more than 668 universities in Africa yearly do not get jobs.

With the level of poverty, unemployment and high working poverty, the youth have no option than to seek migration.

According to the ILO report, 38 percent of the youth in the sub-Saharan Africa are ready to move out of the continent while the figure is 35 percent in North Africa in 2015.  Among sub-Saharan African countries, the percentage of the youth willing to migrate ranges from 77 per cent in Sierra Leone to 11 per cent in Madagascar, according to ILO.

Figures are almost becoming boring to many Africans. What is needed is action.

Tony Elumelu, chairman of Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), has taken up a challenge to raise 10,000 young graduates that will become the pride of the continent in 10 years.

The model is simple. There is $100 million meant for 10,000 entrepreneurs across Africa. Apply online, and if your business is high-impact, then you will be selected. This year, which is the second edition, 1,000 young entrepreneurs were selected and hosted in the Nigeria Law School, Lagos, for onward mentoring.

Tony Elumelu had regret during the TEF Forum in Lagos which held on November 29. The regret stemmed from the fact that 20,000 young entrepreneurs applied for the grant of $5,000 in 2015 but only 1,000 were shortlisted. This year, 45,000 applied but only 1,000 were also shortlisted.

“As excited I am about the 2,000 entrepreneurs that we have selected to benefit the program in its first two years, this gathering is in some ways bittersweet for me,” Elumelu said.

“Because my heart still carries with me the entrepreneurs behind the 63,000 ideas we couldn’t select. And some of them were brilliant! They deserve a chance too.  They deserve every chance we can give them,” Elumelu said.

“And so I have carried them with me from Dakar to Dar-Es-Salaam, and from Kampala to Kigali to Cape town, to have this conversation with our political leaders and as I have brought hundreds of young Elumelu entrepreneurs before them to remind them that alongside their social welfare priorities should exist economic opportunity priorities,” he said

He said the challenge before African leaders was to tell the world they would take action to support entrepreneurs and improve the enabling environment for them to succeed.

According to Elumelu, who is also the chairman of Heirs Holdings and the United Bank for Africa, Momarr Mass Taal, the CEO of Tropingo Foods, who got $5,000 seed capital last year, had turned his enterprise into a $1.2 million revenue business.

From the trend in the first two years, applications in 2017  might hit 60,000 or 70,000. This is why the well-to-do Africans need to support Tony Elumelu’s vision to ensure that more start-ups in the continent are given the necessary support to grow.

Another side of the story is that the rich class in the continent, including governments, should not allow this gesture to end in 10 years. This could have informed why Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s former president, who was at the TEF Forum on October 29, threw a challenge to wealthy Africans to help sustain the project.

Kennedy Uzoka,  group managing director/ CEO of UBA, said that African micro, small and medium businesses often had challenges such as absence of verifiable customer bio-data, skills and capacity gaps, absence of a defined organisational and management structure, and reluctance of the industry majors to provide necessary guarantees, stressing that the bank had supported entrepreneurship in the continent in many ways.