Supporting Entrepreneurship in Africa

In 2018, the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), the French Development Agency (AFD) and the French Institute for Research in Africa, Nigeria (IFRA-Nigeria) signed a partnership agreement that included a knowledge production component. It was decided that this would consist in an academic research work.

The primary objective of this research collaboration is to assess the economic and social impact of the TEF entrepreneurship programme in four African countries. This research partnership shall allow for taking a deeper dive into a selection of businesses established or developed with the support of TEEP and an assessment of their effects within particular areas and communities.

The research aims to shed light on some of the following issues: (1) the economic and social impact of TEF entrepreneurs in their host communities, (2) additional funding received by entrepreneurs upon programme completion, (3) the ease of doing business in their respective countries, (4) the impact of their businesses within rural communities and (5) the capacity of TEF entrepreneurs to achieve or help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (SDGs).

The following countries are of importance to TEF due to their thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and also because they account for the highest number of TEF entrepreneurs in Anglophone and Francophone Africa:

• Nigeria (1969)
• Kenya (385)
• Cameroun (106)
• Côte d’Ivoire (68)

Two junior researchers were selected by IFRA-Nigeria to work on the project:

• Terhemen Agabo, a Master’s student in Economics from the University of Ibadan (Nigeria)
• Luc-Yaovi Kouassi, a Master’s student in Political Sciences at the Panthéon Sorbonne Paris 1 University (France)

They were hosted within IFRA permises in Ibadan to prepare the fieldwork and analyse the data. Their work was supervised and coordinated all along by IFRA’s research associate, Clémentine Chazal and IFRA’s Director, Dr. Elodie Apard.

The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) provided a database of entrepreneurs as well as other logistical support for the work.