The
Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), Africa’s leading entrepreneurship
philanthropy,
is partnering with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale
Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, the German Government’s Agency for
International Cooperation.
GIZ will support the Tony
Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme to empower 210 young
African entrepreneurs, focusing specifically on female
entrepreneurs and tech-enabled businesses. The Entrepreneurship
Programme of TEF was launched in 2015, having supported more than 4,000
entrepreneurs with seed capital pan-African wide. The announcement is
coming ahead of the largest gathering of African entrepreneurs
– The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Forum – which will hold
on October 25, 2018 in Lagos, Nigeria. The Forum will celebrate the 2018
cohort of the Foundation’s beneficiaries.
The joint partnership will
equip more African entrepreneurs with the skills needed to build strong
and sustainable businesses, while providing them
with access to seed funding. The partnership will be implemented by
Make-IT in Africa, a programme GIZ is implementing on behalf of the
German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Make-IT already works in close collaboration with
more than 20 corporate and financing partners, social enterprises,
hubs, and networks to support an enabling environment for young
entrepreneurs, to enable better access to finance, markets, and skills.
By signing a Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU) on 8th August 2018, GIZ and TEF strengthened the
entrepreneurial ecosystem to support African entrepreneurs.
GIZ and TEF share the common understanding that young companies,
especially from the technology sector, have the potential to radically
transform the business landscape in Africa and are key drivers of
sustainable development.
Parminder Vir, OBE, CEO of
the Tony Elumelu Foundation, said: “The partnership with GIZ ensures
that more entrepreneurs across Africa will access
seed capital, as well as the world-class TEF proprietary online
training and mentoring programme. Since the launch of the programme, we
have received over 300,000 applications, and we are actively looking at
leveraging our success, so we can greatly exceed
our own commitment to 1,000 entrepreneurs annually over 10 years.”
Dr. Thomas Kirsch, the
Country Director of GIZ Nigeria, said:” Employment is the key measure
for socio-economic development in Nigeria. Entrepreneurs
and start-ups have the capacity to facilitate job creation in a way
that wasn’t imaginable ten years ago. We’ve entered a new era where
initiatives by the German government, such as Make-IT in Africa, could
be instrumental in empowering youth by addressing
the skills gap and connecting them to markets, corporates, and
financing opportunities. We are encouraged by this partnership with TEF
and the opportunity to create lasting impact in the lives of many.”
The TEF-GIZ partnership is based on:
·
A
commitment of EUR 1 million by the German Government (BMZ), via the Make
IT Programme, to empower 210 young and/or
female tech entrepreneurs in the sectors of agriculture, energy, and
health across Africa through capacity development training.
·
Leveraging
the ground-breaking capacity building, training, and mentoring approach
of the Tony Elumelu Foundation
through its TEF Entrepreneurship Programme, which enables entrepreneurs
to acquire management skills and establish long-term partnerships with
peers, business and financing partners.
·
The growth of a network of African and European start-ups that enables sharing of lessons learnt, new partnerships,
and linkages to entrepreneurial “ecosystems” in Africa.
·
The
TEF Entrepreneurship Programme is the $ 100 million flagship programme
of the Foundation. It
identified 10,000 African start-ups and entrepreneurs with ideas that
have the potential to transform the African continent in the last 10
years. For TEF, the goal is to invest in the generation of at least
1,000,000 new jobs and to contribute $ 10 billion
in new annual revenues across Africa. The Foundation’s investment and
commitment to advancing entrepreneurship is predicated on the belief
that Africa’s entrepreneurs hold the key to unlocking the potential of
the continent and to facilitating its transformation.
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