Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme — Pan-African Seed Funding at Continental Scale

Launched in 2015 with a 10-year, $100 million commitment from the Tony Elumelu Foundation (Lagos, Nigeria), the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme is open to applicants from all 54 African countries.

The programme aims to support African entrepreneurs with seed capital, structured training and mentoring, with candidate selection supported by Ernst & Young for independence.

Selected entrepreneurs receive $5,000 in non-refundable seed capital, a 12-week business training curriculum delivered through the TEFConnect digital platform, and mentoring.

By its tenth year the programme had funded or supported more than 24,000–27,000 entrepreneurs. The Foundation reports alumni businesses collectively generated over $4.2 billion in revenue and created more than 1.5 million jobs since 2015, reaching over four million households. An independent ORB International evaluation, framed around SDG 1 and SDG 8 in Nigeria, found TEF beneficiaries reported earning a profit in the past six months significantly more often than matched non-beneficiaries, and linked TEF-supported businesses to more than 2.1 million Africans moving above the poverty line.

The headline revenue and job totals are the Foundation's own aggregation across tens of thousands of small businesses and are not a causal estimate; the one independently commissioned study is narrower in scope (survey-based, Nigeria-focused) than the continent-wide totals TEF publicises, so the strongest evidence supports a real but more modest effect than the topline figures imply.