Pledging $100 million to African entrepreneurs that would benefit a cohort of 1,000 recipients each year for a decade, struck Tony Elumelu and Awele Vivien Elumelu as a bold commitment in 2015. By the third year, hundreds of thousands of people were applying. “We set out to democratize luck,” says Tony Elumelu, the Nigerian economist and banker. The overwhelming demand, he adds, meant they were now in the business of “dashing hopes.”
Going well beyond its initial promise, the Tony Elumelu Foundation has provided mentorship and a seed grant of $5,000 each to more than 27,000 entrepreneurs. The foundation’s 12th cohort is more than triple the size of its initial group of 1,000. More than half are women, up from roughly a fifth in the early years.
Applications still far exceed the number of openings, so the foundation has turned training materials into free online programs that have reached over 2.5 million people. Alumni have started ventures in everything from agriculture to video games, cumulatively generating $4.2 billion in revenue, according to the foundation’s count.
The program has grown with the help of partnerships with the U.N. Development Programme, the European Commission, as well as French and German development agencies, and corporate philanthropies like Google.org and the Ikea Foundation. Tony, who has long criticized Africa’s dependence on foreign aid, sees such partnerships as a more sustainable approach to growth. “We should not intervene in Africa in a manner that makes us perpetually dependent on it,” he says, but instead “in a manner that prepares us to take care and look after ourselves with dignity.”
For Tony Elumelu, this is his third significant recognition from TIME. He was named to the TIME100 list of the world’s most influential people in 2020, and received the inaugural TIME100 Impact Award in 2022. The 2026 Philanthropy honour is the first to formally recognize both him and Awele Elumelu together, reflecting her role as co-founder and the part she has played in building TEF into what it is today.
