Over 93,000 African Entrepreneurs from 55 African countries applied for the 2017 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program, more than doubling the number of applications received in 2016.
This evening, the Tony Elumelu Foundation announced the selected 1,000 Tony Elumelu entrepreneurs for 2017. Out of the 1000 selected entrepreneurs, 74 were from Uganda. This represented 7.4% of the selected candidates.
93,000 applications. 55 African Countries. 1,000 entrepreneurs selected.
Meet the 2017 @TonyOElumlelu Entrepreneurs https://t.co/UZgEUTcUSE pic.twitter.com/KwpAk2eXYr
— Tony Elumelu FDN (@TonyElumeluFDN) March 22, 2017
With this number, Uganda has the second highest representation after Nigeria which got a representation of 509 - 50.9% of the successful candidates. This is not a surprise given that Nigeria had 57.1% (57686) applicants with Uganda having only 4.1% (411).
What is more surprising is that neighbors Kenya had 606 applicants for the program but only 55 were successful. The country with the least representation is Eritrea with just 1 person - he must be lucky!
One of the notable Ugandan successful candidates is Julius Muwonge, the founder of Yohomu Deliveries - who also represented Uganda at the 2016 Mandela Washington Fellowship.
BREAKING:
Ladies and Gentlemen, here is the list of Ugandans who have been selected for the 2017 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program.
— StartupDigestAfrica (@DigestAfrica) March 22, 2017
With Nigeria's boost, the Western Africa region took the lions share of the 1000 successful applicants at 62.4%, followed by the Eastern Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa and Northern Africa regions with 25.8%, 6.6%, 3.6% and 1.6% respectively.
Though the results shouldn't be surprising when you consider the number of applicant per region. The Western Africa region still dominated by 67.5%(6845) followed by the Eastern, Southern, Central and Northern Africa regions at 21.1%(2133), 5.5%(558), 4.9%(495) and 1.0%(104) applicants respectively.
At 27.4%, the agriculture sector had the biggest representation for now the third year running,though it was a slight drop from last years 28.8%. While as the aviation industry, at 0.04%, had the least representation - still for the third year running.
Male entreprenuers continued to dominate for the third year running as 67% of the selected candidates were male. This was an a drop in dominance from last year's 68%.
The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme is the flagship entrepreneurship programme of the Tony Elumelu Foundation, founded by the entrepreneur, respected investor and philanthropist Tony O. Elumelu.
The vision of the foundation is to establish the pre-eminent pan-African entrepreneurship programme and create 10,000 startups across Africa within the next 10 years that generate significant employment and wealth.
It hopes to grow these businesses through business skills training, mentoring, access to seed capital funding, information and membership in our Africa-wide alumni network so that they can generate at least 1,000,000 new jobs and contribute at least $10 billion in revenues across Africa over 10 years.
The successful candidates have a variety of benefits awaiting them in form of a 12-week programme to equip startups with the basic skills required to launch and run their businesses at the early stage of their growth.
The programme is a mix of online and face-to-face instruction, including webinars and video tutorials with support from your mentor throughout. It will cover topics on starting and scaling a business, business development, marketing strategy, effective management and product design.
The other benefits include mentoring, an online resource library, meetups for networking hosted by members of TEEP alumni, an annual TEF Entrepreneurship Forum to showcase the African startup to a global audience of entrepreneurs, incubators, business, corporations, government, investors, academia and foundations, the TEF alumni network as well as the non-returnable investment for further development of their business idea in form Seed capital.
Thank you to @TonyElumeluFDN for selecting us for 2017 Mentorship & support. Truly humbled. Welldone to everyone who submitted applications!
— moWoza (@moWoza) March 22, 2017
From Startup Digest Africa, we say congratulations to all the 1000 that have been selected. Go and make your continent proud.
Click here to view full list of all 1000 successful applicants.