CIPMEN — Niamey's Public-Private Business Incubator for the Sahel

CIPMEN (Centre Incubateur des PME au Niger) was founded in Niamey in April 2014 as a public-private business incubator focused on small and medium enterprises in environment, renewable energy, agribusiness and, later, ICT and fintech.

CIPMEN aims to incubate and train SMEs in Sahel-relevant sectors and to build a wider regional incubation network.

The incubator runs recurring programmes such as the Café Numérique fintech forum, the Hack the Goals Niger hackathon, the eTakara.ne digital competition and the CODELOCCOL coding academy, with notable graduate companies including AgriPart, Tout Azimut, City Links and Niger Digital.

An early account from 2017 reported that CIPMEN had accompanied nearly 600 enterprises, trained more than 1,000 people, and that its supported companies had cumulatively generated about 700 million CFA francs in revenue, with backers at the time including Orange, the Sinergi fund, Bolloré, Total, Veolia and Bank of Africa. A later profile from 2023 described a narrower, more formal incubation track record -- 222 companies incubated and over 7,901 people trained through more than 30 events -- with backers by then including the government of Niger, the World Bank, the French Development Agency (AFD) and TotalEnergies.

The two independent accounts use different, seemingly incompatible counting methods for 'enterprises supported' (600 vs 222), most likely reflecting a narrower definition of formal incubation in the later report rather than a decline in activity; no independent audit reconciling the two was identified, so figures are reported here as self- and media-reported rather than externally verified.