Women entrepreneurs in Nigeria can now apply to take part in our flagship Road to Growth programme, a seven-week intensive learning course to build women entrepreneurs’ business management skills and investment readiness. Training will start next month.
This exciting new opportunity comes thanks to the support of our partner the ExxonMobil Foundation and will be delivered with our in-country partner the Enterprise Development Centre. So far, the partnership has supported over 22,500 women entrepreneurs in Nigeria.
To celebrate the programme’s successes so far, we’re releasing a brand-new video featuring some of the thousands of women who’ve participated in Road to Growth in Nigeria.
According to the Council of Foreign Relations, Nigeria’s GDP could grow by 23% by 2025 if women and men participated equally in the economy. The power of women entrepreneurs is far more than their economic worth, however, and as the Enterprise Development Centre’s Deputy Director Nneka Okekearu explains in the video: “A lot of [the women entrepreneurs] are growing other young entrepreneurs in the same sector […] Their families are better for it, their children can go to better schools.”
The moment you empower one woman, you are empowering her children, and you are also granting support financially, emotionally and psychologically to all the people around her.
Each of the women featured in the video, which was filmed a year after their participation in the programme from 2019-2020, also harnessed its training to overcome the unexpected challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic posed for their businesses. They adapted their newly created business plans to ensure their businesses were resilient enough to survive into the future. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, 75% of women entrepreneurs increased their savings, and 51% increased their business revenues a year after taking part in the programme.
In the words of Ene Adasen, Founder of Ene Naturals: “The programme kept me prepared, and I was quite proud of myself that I wasn’t pulled down by the pandemic.”
We’re proud to highlight these women’s incredible journeys and successes and can’t wait to see everything that the fourth Road to Growth class in Nigeria achieve this autumn.
100,000 More Women Entrepreneurs
Our fourth Road to Growth programme in Nigeria forms part of our ambitious 100,000 Women Campaign to support another 100,000 women in low and middle income countries over 2020, 2021 and 2022. Road to Growth is currently available in Nigeria, Indonesia and Vietnam, Kenya, and most recently Guyana. The Foundation is working to scale further across sub-Saharan Africa, where according to the United Nations Development Programme economies lose nearly $100 billion a year because of the labour market gap. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss potential partnerships!
