Context

Youth-led enterprises are central to Africa’s economic growth, job creation and transition toward more sustainable markets. The Tony Elumelu Foundation, in collaboration with UNICEF, needed to manage a green economy grant of over $500,000 targeting youth-led SMEs across Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.

Challenge

The programme received over 1,000 applications and required a rigorous, transparent and data-driven process to identify high-potential businesses aligned with sustainability, growth and impact priorities. The challenge was to ensure quality, fairness and accountability across the full selection process.

Approach

Gawani provided quality assurance across the grant management lifecycle. We developed and implemented an impact assessment framework to guide evaluation, strengthen decision-making and align the selection process with the programme’s long-term sustainability goals.

Our work included oversight of the appraisal and selection of more than 100 SMEs, streamlining review mechanisms and safeguarding process integrity throughout the grant process.

Outcome

The BeGreen programme successfully identified and funded more than 100 high-performing youth entrepreneurs across the green economy. The process strengthened the pipeline of sustainable SMEs and improved confidence in the quality and fairness of the selection outcome.

Sustainability

The assessment framework created a replicable model for future large-scale entrepreneurship programmes, strengthening transparency, accountability and long-term programme design for enterprise support across Africa.