Nigerian billionaire Tony Elumelu has credited his mother with teaching him the fundamentals of business, using her experience as a small restaurant owner to champion the necessity of women’s economic leadership in Africa. Speaking on Friday at the 25th Annual Conference of Women in Management, Business and Public Service (WIMBIZ) at Eko Hotel and Suites in Lagos, Elumelu argued that female participation in the economy is not merely a matter of fairness, but a critical requirement for the continent’s competitiveness.
Elumelu, chairman of Heirs Holdings, recalled that his earliest lessons in entrepreneurship—including risk management, cash flow, customer relations, and resilience—came from observing his mother build a business to support her family. “I did not start with capital. I started with a mother, a mother who ran a small restaurant and worked harder than anyone I’ve ever known,” he stated. He described her daily efforts as his “first business school,” noting that she taught him how to turn minimal resources into a sustainable future for their children.
“Women’s economic leadership is not a concession to fairness. It is a requirement for competitiveness,” Elumelu said.
To illustrate the scale of female involvement in his initiatives, Elumelu disclosed that 48 per cent of the 24,633 entrepreneurs supported by the Tony Elumelu Foundation over the past 15 years were women. The foundation has disbursed more than $120 million in seed capital to entrepreneurs across all 54 African countries, a contribution that has helped create over 1.5 million jobs and generate more than $4.2 billion in revenue. Elumelu urged African leaders and business owners to provide women with greater access to funding, insisting that inclusive prosperity is unattainable if half of the continent’s talent is undervalued.
Beyond gender equality, Elumelu identified three major obstacles hindering Africa’s economic prosperity: unreliable electricity, inadequate value creation, and a shortage of capital. Addressing the conference theme, “Rooted, Rising, Ready: Born in Africa, Built for the World,” he emphasized that reliable power is a prerequisite for industrialisation and the adoption of emerging technologies. “We cannot talk about AI without fixing electricity. It is not possible. If we fix electricity, Africa will take off,” he asserted.
Elumelu also challenged African nations to move beyond exporting raw materials and importing finished goods, urging them to develop the capacity to process and rebrand products for international markets. He stressed the importance of mobilising capital internally through savings, investments, pension funds, and insurance companies, declaring that “the future is investment and trade.”
Highlighting the gap between talent and resources, Elumelu revealed that the Tony Elumelu Foundation received 265,529 applications from young Africans with business ideas in 2026 but could only support 3,200 of them. He noted that this disparity demonstrates a shortage of capital rather than a lack of entrepreneurial talent, marking the scale of the opportunity Africa must unlock. The WIMBIZ conference, which marked the organisation’s 25th anniversary, brought together women in business, management, and public service to discuss the continent’s place in the global economy.
<small>Source: Vanguard News — read the original story there.</small>
