WIMBIZ: ‘I learnt business from my mother’ – Tony Elumelu champions women’s economic leadership

By Enitan Abdultawab Billionaire businessman Tony Elumelu has credited his mother with teaching him the fundamentals of business, using her experience as a small restaurant owner to emphasise the importance of women’s economic leadership and participation in Africa’s development. Elumelu said his earliest lessons in entrepreneurship, including risk management, cash flow, customer relations, discipline and resilience, came from watching his mother build a business and provide for her family.

Elumelu, who spoke on Friday at the 25th Annual Conference of Women in Management, Business and Public Service (WIMBIZ), held at Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos, recalled how his mother’s hard work shaped his understanding of business. “I did not start with capital. I started with a mother, a mother who ran a small restaurant and worked harder than anyone I’ve ever known.

“I watched her turn very little into a living, and a living into a future for our children. That was my first business school,” he said. He added that his understanding of the practical demands of running a business came from observing her daily experiences. “My first lesson in risk, in cash flow, in customers, in discipline, in hard work, in resilience, in getting up the next morning when the day before had gone very badly, came all from her, a woman,” he said.

Drawing from that experience, the chairman of Heirs Holdings argued that women’s participation in business and economic leadership was not simply a matter of fairness but a necessity for Africa’s competitiveness. “Women’s economic leadership is not a concession to fairness. It is a requirement for competitiveness,” he said. Elumelu disclosed that 48 per cent of the 24,633 entrepreneurs supported by the Tony Elumelu Foundation over 15 years were women.

According to him, the foundation has disbursed more than $120 million in seed capital to entrepreneurs across all 54 African countries, helping them create more than 1.5 million jobs and generate over $4.2 billion in revenue. He urged African leaders and business owners to provide women with greater access to funding and opportunities to lead businesses, insisting that the continent could not achieve inclusive prosperity by undervaluing half of its talent.

Beyond women’s participation in the economy, Elumelu identified unreliable electricity, inadequate value creation and shortage of capital as three major obstacles standing between Africa and its economic prosperity. Speaking on the conference theme, “Rooted, Rising, Ready: Born in Africa, Built for the World,” he described electricity as a critical requirement for industrialisation and technological development, arguing that African countries could not fully embrace emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence without reliable power.

“We cannot talk about AI without fixing electricity. It is not possible. If we fix electricity, Africa will take off,” he said. On value creation, he challenged African countries to move beyond exporting raw materials and importing finished products, urging them to develop the capacity to process, rebrand and sell their products to international markets.

He also stressed the importance of mobilising capital within Africa through savings, investments, pension funds, insurance companies and financial institutions, arguing that the continent’s economic future depended on investment and trade. “The future is investment and trade,” he said. Highlighting the funding challenges facing young entrepreneurs, Elumelu revealed that the Tony Elumelu Foundation received 265,529 applications from young Africans with business ideas in 2026 but could only support 3,200 of them.

He said the figures demonstrated that Africa was not short of entrepreneurial talent but lacked sufficient capital to support the ideas and businesses emerging across the continent. “That is not a shortage of entrepreneurial talent; it is a shortage of capital. That is the scale of the opportunity Africa must unlock, and the capital we must mobilise,” he said.

The WIMBIZ conference marked the organisation’s 25th anniversary and brought together women in business, management and public service to discuss opportunities for African women and the continent’s place in the global economy.