Tony Elumelu
The All World Network (co-founded by Prof. Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School) and the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), have concluded plans to showcase innovative and dynamic fast-growth companies in Nigeria to global funds and clientele.
Research Manager at the TEF, Ms. Ebi Brisibe, disclosed that about 11 organisations, including the Fate Foundation, the Nigerian-American Chamber of Commerce, the Nigeria Employers Consultative Association, the Lagos Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Jobberman, and Leap Africa, have joined the project as nominating partners.
Others are The Lagos Business School, Enterprise Development Centre, United Bank for Africa Plc, and SMEDAN.
More than 100 companies are said to have begun the application process. The Nigeria Fast Growth 50 (Nigeria 50), a pioneering effort to showcase and rank the most innovative and dynamic fast-growth private companies in Nigeria, is patterned after the United States’ Inner City 100 and joins other AllWorld rankings that exist in the Middle East, North Africa, India, Pakistan, South Africa and Turkey.
The application process, Brisibe said, is open to private companies in Nigeria who have been able to grow revenues 100 per cent or more in the past three years.
To be eligible for the ranking, according to Co-founder of the AllWorld Network Inc.,
Deirdre Coyle, Jr, prospective companies are expected to have a minimum of three-year audited operating history with revenues or turnover of, at least, N80 million ($500,000) as at 2011.
Apart from having its primary location in Nigeria, an applicant, according to the organisers, should also be an independent, private, non-listed, for-profit corporation/partnership/proprietorship.
The company can be an independently incorporated subsidiary of a wider group, with a defined stand-alone business line and must not be over 50 per cent owned by a publicly traded company or from the public sector.
“The challenge for these companies,” according to Coyle, is that they are currently not on the global economic radar screen, and that is where AllWorld and the Tony Elumelu Foundation come in. “Recognising that entrepreneurship drives economic growth and innovation, the Nigeria50 will show the country and the world that Nigeria is open for business. The model is simple – find growth entrepreneurs, credential them, put them on the global radar screen, and markets will come to them,” Coyle said.