Nigerian businessman and philanthropist Tony Elumelu has emerged as the week’s African Voices winner of the Changemakers. He was named for the awards by African Voices Changemakers, a CNN International initiative.
Elumelu is a major motivator of young African entrepreneurs, after years in the banking world,
He is using his experience to help those eager to start their own businesses take off.
Elumelu made his fortune in banking, making his mark in the business world with the merger of his bank Standard Trust Bank, with the United Bank for Africa. This is just one of the companies in his portfolio. Elumelu also heads an investment company that holds major stakes in power, oil and gas, real estate, and healthcare.
But one of his biggest investments has been in the African business leaders of the future. Elumelu tells CNN that he wants to encourage, “Young African entrepreneurs to succeed and surpass what we have done as African business leaders.”
This drive to see Africans succeed in all forms of business led Elumelu to launch a bold initiative. He talks about this decision, “And I said okay, let’s commit an amount, let’s commit to a timeframe. And that’s how we came about 100 million dollars, for 10 years. A thousand entrepreneurs every year.”
This commitment was the premise behind what became the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme which launched in 2015. It’s a fellowship that includes 12 weeks of training, mentoring, and $5000 of seed funding. To date, more than seven thousand aspiring entrepreneurs have gone through the programme.
CNN travels with Elumelu to meet some of the entrepreneurs who have become successful after completing the foundation’s programme. One of the businessmen is NdubuisiEze who explains his initial business pitch, “I applied with just an idea of using drones to support crop dusting and also gather data on farms and that’s where the magic really started.”
After gaining access to the intra-African trade fair through the Elumelu Foundation, Eze was spotted by a Singaporean minister and now his drone company is up and running in Singapore. Eze describes how his success would not have been possible without the Elumelu Foundation, “Without the Elumelu Foundation Programme there was no way, not a chance for this idea that I had at that time to take off. The programme not only helped the business plan, it put us through how to evaluate customer acquisitions, and the business canvas helped you break down where you are going to get your resources.”