The Tony Elumelu Foundation has released the list of 1000 African entrepreneurs selected for the 2017 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme. The list consists of mostly Nigerians and some entrepreneurs from 51 other countries including Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa
Over 93,000 African Entrepreneurs applied from 55 African countries and terrtories, more than twice 2016 applications and nearly four times 2015.
Over the next nine months, the 2017 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurs will be trained and mentored, and will use the skills acquired to develop a business plan. Following which, they will be eligible to receive up to $10,000 in seed capital.
According to Founder, Tony O. Elumelu, CON; “Standing here today to announce the successful applicants is bittersweet; we have 92,000 budding business leaders who weren’t selected for our Programme and these young African men and women have demonstrated a lot of energy innovation and creativity in their applications. We should not relent until we help them ALL realize their aspirations.”
Agriculture leads the sectors with (29%) of applicants coming from this sector, followed by ICT (11%) and manufacturing (9%), reflecting the industries of interest for African startups. Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Cameroon produced the most applicants.
CEO, Parminder Vir OBE, said: “The achievements of each successive cohort is clear evidence of the growing transformative power of our Programme. We recently sampled 600 of our existing 2,000 entrepreneurs to analyse the Programme’s impact and have been impressed by the robustness and particularly impact on employment we are beginning to have. We have also partnered with organisations, including Microsoft, GE, ECOWAS, to provide further benefits to our entrepreneurs.”
The Programme culminates in the TEF Entrepreneurship Forum – the largest annual gathering of African entrepreneurs and the full entrepreneurship ecosystem from across the continent, which brings together entrepreneurs, mentors and business and political leaders in October, for a two day event in Lagos, Nigeria.
Here is the list of the 1000 entrepreneurs
