The Tony Elumelu Foundation will unveil its 2026 cohort of entrepreneurs on Sunday, capping one of the continent’s most competitive startup funding cycles after attracting more than 265,000 applications from all 54 African countries.
The scale of interest highlights both the depth of Africa’s entrepreneurial pipeline and the persistent funding gap facing early-stage ventures, even as sectors such as agriculture, artificial intelligence, healthcare and the green economy dominate submissions.
The Lagos-based foundation plans to disburse $16 million across its entrepreneurship programmes this year, supporting 3,200 founders through a mix of corporate and institutional partnerships. That includes backing from groups within Heirs Holdings as well as collaborations with the European Commission, German development agencies and United Nations bodies.
Among the allocations, 1,751 entrepreneurs will be funded through Heirs Holdings affiliates, while more than 1,000 will be supported via partnerships with the European Commission, Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit. Smaller cohorts will be backed in collaboration with institutions including the United Nations Development Programme and Rwanda’s Ministry of Youth and Arts.
Each selected entrepreneur will receive $5,000 in non-refundable seed funding, alongside training, mentorship and access to investor networks through the foundation’s digital platform, TEFConnect. The selection process is overseen by Ernst & Young, adding an independent layer of scrutiny to the highly competitive intake.
Founded by Nigerian billionaire Tony O. Elumelu, the initiative has become one of Africa’s most prominent vehicles for early-stage capital. Since inception, the foundation says it has disbursed more than $100 million to over 24,000 entrepreneurs and provided business training to 2.5 million Africans.
Those businesses have generated a combined $4.2 billion in revenue and created more than 1.5 million jobs, according to the foundation, underscoring the growing role of entrepreneurship in tackling unemployment across the continent. Nearly half of the beneficiaries have been women, reflecting a deliberate push toward inclusive growth.
“The future of Africa will be built by Africans who create businesses, generate jobs and solve the challenges of our continent,” Elumelu said ahead of the announcement, reiterating his long-standing view that entrepreneurship remains the most sustainable path to economic transformation.
The incoming cohort will join a network of more than 24,000 alumni, forming part of an expanding ecosystem that investors and policymakers increasingly view as critical to Africa’s long-term growth trajectory.
