200 females to pitch business ideas at Y’ellopreneur

Two hundred Nigerian female entrepreneurs have been selected to pitch their sustainable business ideas to receive N2 million grants each in the ongoing Y’ellopreneur initiative by MTN Foundation.

The programme, which is in its first phase, kicked off with the training of 500 female business owners in partnership with the Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) following the successful completion of the training programme.

According to a recent report by PWC Nigeria, women account for 41 per cent of the ownership of micro-businesses in Nigeria, with 23 million female entrepreneurs operating within this segment. Despite the numbers, a lot of female entrepreneurs struggle to scale their businesses due to lack of access to start-up capital or capital for expansion and inadequate business training, which creates a skills gap.

The Y’ellopreneur programme, which is in its first phase, is designed to build the entrepreneurial skills of these women through capacity-building sessions and provide equipment loans of up to N2 million each to 150 entrepreneurs with recommended bankable businesses.

The goal of the initiative is to equip female business entrepreneurs with business skills and funds to impact the growth of their businesses and scale it to become sustainable while also providing job opportunities.