Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) — A State-Level Jobs and MSME Finance Trust

The Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) was created under the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund Law of 2016 to tackle youth and women unemployment in Africa's largest city-economy, with a legal mandate to invest up to ₦25 billion in MSME financing and skills development.

LSETF runs five parallel tracks: access to finance, skills development, capacity building, market access and technology-ecosystem support.

By its 10-year anniversary in 2026, LSETF reported having disbursed more than ₦15 billion in loans to over 20,000 MSMEs, contributing to an estimated 320,000 direct and indirect jobs and preserving around 173,000 jobs that were at risk, with a 94% loan-repayment rate that the fund says is in line with the Central Bank of Nigeria's benchmark default rate. More than 82,000 small businesses have gone through its capacity-building programmes, and the fund has separately reported around 40,000 MSMEs supported and 12,000 skills-development interventions for youth and women through its listing with Youth Business International.

These figures come from LSETF's own reporting and affiliate coverage rather than an independent econometric evaluation of the kind conducted for comparable European SME funds, so the scale of activity is well documented across multiple sources but the counterfactual rigor — what would have happened to these firms and jobs without the fund — has not been independently established.