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About The Tony Elumelu Foundation

The Tony Elumelu Foundation is the leading philanthropy empowering a new generation of African entrepreneurs, driving poverty eradication, catalysing job creation across all 54 African countries, and ensuring inclusive economic empowerment. Since the launch of the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme in 2015, the Foundation has trained over 1.5 million young Africans on its digital hub, TEFConnect, and disbursed nearly USD$100 million in direct funding to 18,000 African women and men, who have collectively created over 400,000 direct and indirect jobs. The Foundation’s mission is rooted in Africapitalism, which positions the private sector, and most importantly entrepreneurs, as the catalyst for the social and economic development of the African continent

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Kigali, 13^th October 2022: The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Rwanda and the Tony Elumelu Foundation have signed a historic 4-year agreement worth $1.4m USD and lasting from 2022-2026 to empower the youth of Rwanda to benefit from more inclusive, competitive, and sustainable economic growth in the country. It is part of the new partnership agreement signed with the European Union (EU) earlier this year aimed to expand the socio- economic opportunities for youth.

This new partnership will position entrepreneurship as a driver of business growth and job creation, empowering young people through an intensive programme involving entrepreneurship capacity building, financial start-up support, and one-on-one business mentorship. Set to be undertaken by UNDP alongside the Tony Elumelu Foundation and the Ministry of Youth and Culture, the programme will:

1. Provide training to 400 young Rwandan entrepreneurs with an innovative business idea.
2. Provide seed funding to 100 young Rwandan entrepreneurs to start and scale their businesses.
3. Provide one-on-one business mentorship delivered by the nation’s leading entrepreneurs.
4. Ensure that 50 percent of programme beneficiaries are women.

The youth of Rwanda (aged 16-30 years) make up around one third of the country’s population. While youth remain key to the country’s transformational growth, the youth of Rwanda still face several challenges including high levels of poverty (29.5 percent of young people live in households below the poverty line), high levels of unemployment and underemployment (15.7 percent unemployment rate among young people), as well as low levels of entrepreneurship and skills shortages.

Youth unemployment remains a persistent development challenge, with UNDP and partners positioning job creation fuelled by entrepreneurship – particularly youth-led small and medium enterprises (SMEs) – as a priority development solution.

Mr. Maxwell Gomera, UNDP Resident Representative in Rwanda outlined the importance of young people in shaping Rwanda’s development journey. “This partnership with the Tony Elumelu Foundation will directly benefit the young men and women of Rwanda through the creation of more than 1,600 new businesses,” he said. “I have no doubt that these businesses, led by a new generation of entrepreneurs, will also contribute greatly to jobs creation and livelihoods opportunities for more youth. UNDP is committed to positioning young people at the heart of Rwanda’s development journey and alongside our valued partners we will continue to empower young men and women to reach their fullest potential.”

“We are excited to scale our impact of poverty alleviation, job creation and women empowerment in Africa through this inaugural partnership with UNDP Rwanda, and the Rwandan Ministry of Youth and Culture. The Tony Elumelu Foundation entrepreneurship programme was developed on the principle that the economic empowerment of African youth is pivotal to economic growth and sustainable development across the African continent, and we believe that this partnership will move us closer to our shared vision to support African youth through entrepreneurship by creating sustainable opportunities for transformative development across the continent.” – Ifeyinwa Ugochukwu, CEO TEF.

About UNDP

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the leading United Nations organization fighting to end the injustices of poverty, inequality and climate change. Working with a broad network of experts and partners in over 170 countries, UNDP helps nations to build integrated and lasting solutions for people and planet.

UNDP is committed to addressing the youth unemployment and underemployment challenge through equipping youth with vocational skills, increasing the competitiveness of youth within the labour market, building capacities of national institutions to mainstream youth employment, and supporting youth-led enterprises to pilot and scale innovative ideas.

About Tony Elumelu Foundation

The Tony Elumelu Foundation is the leading champion of entrepreneurship in Africa, with the objective of empowering women and men across the continent, catalysing economic growth, driving poverty eradication, and ensuring job creation. The Tony Elumelu Foundation’s vision is predicated on our Founder, Mr. Tony O. Elumelu C.F.R.’s economic principle of Africapitalism, which emphasises the critical role that the private sector – more specifically entrepreneurs – play in the fulfilment of Africa’s development, and to actualize this, the private sector must create both economic and social wealth.

The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme is a flagship programme of the Foundation with the purpose of: i) identifying 10,000 African start-ups and entrepreneurs with ideas that have the potential to succeed, over a period of ten years; ii) supporting the growth of these businesses through business training, mentorship, access to seed funding, and admitting entrepreneurs as members of the Foundation’s Africa-wide alumni network and; iii) creating businesses that can generate at least 1 million new jobs and contribute at least $10 billion USD in new annual revenues across Africa.

For media inquiries contact: 

Stella Tushabe
External Relations Officer, UNDP 
stella.tushabe@undp.org  

Moyo Olisa 
Ag. Head, Marketing & Corporate Comms, TEF 
Moyo.olisa@tonyelumelufoundation.org 

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The initiative will fund 200 additional young African entrepreneurs complementing the US$100M Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme that has identified, trained, mentored and funded over 9,000 entrepreneurs from all 54 African countries since 2015. The partnership will also help to scale TEFConnect, the Foundation’s proprietary digital platform supporting African entrepreneurs and provide platform access to an additional 500,000 SMEs. The initiative is co-financed by DEG with 1.5 million Euro from the develoPPP Program funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

In alignment with TEF and DEG’s development policy, the partnership will create jobs and income, boost economic growth and generate local value in Africa. It will make important contributions to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing funding, technical skills and comprehensive business readiness to drive better performance of SMEs in accordance with SDG 1 (No poverty), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure).

Entrepreneurs will be connected to networking support for further skills development, knowledge sharing and market linkages through a lifetime membership on TEFConnect. In addition, periodic impact assessment of up to 10,000 SMEs will be conducted through the partnership to inform policies and laws that will improve the environment for small enterprises in Africa, directly catalysing Africa’s economic growth and contributing to the continent’s prosperity and social development. 

Commenting on the partnership, the CEO, Tony Elumelu Foundation, Ifeyinwa Ugochukwu, stated, “In our continued quest to invest in African entrepreneurs, this partnership will fully capacitize young entrepreneurs to grow their businesses. DEG is a global player in fostering efforts in emerging markets and developing economies to generate employment, which is a mission we are dedicated to through entrepreneurship. African Entrepreneurs are the engines of growth, innovation and wealth creation in Africa, and there is no better time to invest in their development. The projected outcome of this partnership encompasses the entire entrepreneurial value chain and will create massive opportunity for entrepreneurs to build their ventures while equipping them with the skills to sustain business growth.”

Bernd Tilemann, Head of DEG’s West Africa office added that “DEG is delighted to start this cooperation and especially eager to support TEF’s digitalisation efforts and the drive for impact inclusion and its critical evaluation, which are topics that DEG is very passionate about. We believe these measures will form a great foundation to enable TEF to scale its efforts to boost entrepreneurship and small enterprise development in Nigeria and across the continent.”

The Tony Elumelu Foundation’s US$100 million Entrepreneurship Programme was launched in 2015 to empower 10,000 entrepreneurs over 10 years. Successful applicants receive world-class business training, mentorship, non-refundable seed capital of US$5,000, and global networking opportunities.  The Programme is open to entrepreneurs across all countries in Africa, both new start-ups and existing young businesses, operating in all major economic sectors.

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