The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) have signed a funding agreement worth USD 1.4 million to support young-led Rwandan entrepreneurs.

The partnership agreement was signed yesterday, October 13. The four-year programme aims at pulling resources together to empower Rwandan youth through capacity building, mentoring, access to start-up support and seed capital funding, and will be undertaken by UNDP Rwanda, the Ministry of Youth and Culture, and TEF foundation.

It aims to complement the existing YouthConnekt Rwanda initiative and will benefit 400 young Rwandan entrepreneurs every year with seed funds to start their business. The goal will be to create more than 1,600 new youth led- businesses, with 50% beneficiaries being women entrepreneurs.

While addressing the press, Chief Executive Officer of TEF foundation, Ifeyinwa Ugochukwu, said that Africa has so much potential which must be turned to reality.

"We have seen that African entrepreneurs are innovative, passionate and committed and all they need is a hand on not a hand out. We just need to create a leading environment, up-skill and to finance them, to change the narrative in Africa,” she said.

She added that TEF foundation entrepreneurship programme was developed on the principle that the economic empowerment of African youth is pivotal to economic growth and sustainable development across the African continent; therefore, this is part of the empowerment.

"We have made entrepreneurship empowerment the bed rock and the very essence of what we do and we are excited to scale our impact of poverty alleviation, jobs creation and women empowerment in Africa through this inaugural partnership. With the work we are doing, we hope to make it friendlier and hope to scale the great work that our oppositions are doing and believe that this partnership will move us closer to our shared vision to support African youth through entrepreneurship by creating sustainable opportunities for transformative development across the continent,” Ugochukwu said.

According to Maxwell Gomera, UNDP Resident Representative, "42% of business start-ups that we are coming across fail every year because they failed to access funding, mentorship and this this is a huge loss of talents, capital, time, possibilities and dreams for this continent.”

Gomera said that UNDP recognises that youth are central to the transformation of the continent as a source of innovative solutions to the challenges affecting Africa, therefore, the partnership with TEF will create more new youth led- businesses in Rwanda.

Through the partnership, UNDP and TEF are to contribute towards empowering youth in Rwanda, through the creation of new youth led-businesses, and support to youth-driven SMEs that will generate new jobs and create new opportunities for young male and female Rwandans to support the national development agenda.

The outcome of this partnership is to catalyse a new crop of innovative enterprises that will radically effect change in Rwanda’s socioeconomic progress and can be scaled across Africa.