Two hundred and fifty women across Nigeria have received funding and mentorship support from the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) – a U.S. Government initiative set up to empower female entrepreneurs all over the world.
For the fourth year of AWE, the U.S. Consulate General in Lagos in partnership with Ascend Studios Foundation and Venture Garden Foundation again supported small and medium enterprises owned by women after 200 participants were selected from the 17 states of southern Nigeria and 50 female migrant returnees
for the 2022 cohort.
Speaking during the presentation of certificates to participants after the training, Inya Lawal, president, Ascend Studios Foundation and Programmes Partner for AWE Lagos, said through the programme, women are given the structure that is needed to run a successful business.
“We have a lot of participants who are already into business and some of them lack proper training to sustain the businesses that they have started and that is the value of the programme. These women have access to training, they have 13 courses that covers various businesses. Afterwards, they have facilitators who would come and dissect these courses even further by giving them more information on the courses that they have learnt and then give them access to mentors who would then help them scale their businesses and give them advice,” Lawal said.
Apart from these advantages, she also said there are funding partners who give the women access to funding as well.
She however mentioned that more importantly for the Academy is the network that the women have.
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“This year, we have 250 women, if you are one of the 250 person’s, you have 249 other people you can network with. Some of them become partners, some who are distributors then get producers and some who are producers get distributors and they do business together as well. So the support that is needed for every woman is what this offers.
“For this year, we have been running this for over two months. We had the virtually facilitated sessions and now we are having the in-persons session. We usually start with the virtual programme that runs for about two months, then we end it with the three days conference. We have had the fair and people have come in to buy from them and now they have graduated,” she explained.
Also speaking at the event, Kunmi Demuren, co-founder Venture Garden Foundation said women have been proven over time to have capacity and competence but with society just paying leap service to this, Venture Garden Foundation needed to back this with resources.
According to Demuren, data has shown that women-run businesses do better than businesses run by men, adding that he thought it was time to scale this model.
“The consulate gives us an outlet to allow this product to have global presence. We love the model and we hope this programme can scale from 250 to over one thousand. Imagine what this will look like in 10 years,” he added.
Elamah Masahide, one of the mentors at the event said “Among the participants for this programme, we have women in tech and women are doing a great job. I haven’t seen the energy in this room anywhere in the world. I was opportune to mentor a group and I saw that they are the future. There are women here into recycling, some into technology and so on.
“The mentorship lasted for three days and some had questions that we helped them address. We just created a WhatsApp group for the team we mentored and we are going to follow up.
They have started sharing their ideas and we will see how much we can help them in terms of mentorship and grants,” Masahide added.
Jennifer Foltz, U.S Consulate Public Affairs Officer said AWE started in 2019 with 100 women in Nigeria, the next year 120, last year 250 and this year, another 250, which shows that over 700 women have pass through the academy.
Foltz said she had the opportunity to meet with the over 250 women to find out about their businesses, their products and services, and was very impressed.
“These women were selected from over 16,000 women. In 2019, Nigeria was one of the pilot countries but now the programme is in many countries across the world but Nigeria is an amazing place to be having AWE because of the dynamism and innovation of Nigerian entrepreneurs,” she said.
