The Enterprise Development Centre of Pan-Atlantic University has partnered with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and Kaduna Business School to strengthen the capacity of agricultural small and medium-sized enterprises across Nigeria. The collaboration was unveiled at the recently concluded AG-SME Bootcamp and Pitch Competition, a three-day fully sponsored programme held at the EDC’s office in Lagos.
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What the programme involved
The bootcamp brought together agric SME founders from across the country for intensive training covering investment readiness, operational management, personal finance, and business scaling strategies. Participants pitched their business models before a panel of evaluators, competing for grants designed to accelerate growth in Nigeria’s agricultural value chains.
Eight entrepreneurs emerged as grant winners, each receiving ₦1 million in cash to deploy directly into their businesses. The programme maintained a specific focus on rice, maize, and soybean value chains, three of Nigeria’s most commercially significant crops and areas where SME development could have the most measurable impact on food security and employment.
For agric entrepreneurs, the combination of structured training, mentorship, and direct funding addresses the three most common barriers to scaling — capability, confidence, and capital — in a single programme.
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Why the partnership matters
Stanley Ibeku, Lead for Research, Monitoring and Evaluation at EDC, noted that the collaboration was designed to ensure agric SMEs can access available financing and develop the technical and managerial competencies needed to grow. The involvement of SMEDAN adds a policy and regulatory dimension, while AGRA brings continental agricultural development expertise and the Kaduna Business School contributes business education capacity.
The breadth of the partnership reflects a deliberate effort to go beyond one-off interventions and build a more durable support ecosystem for small businesses in Nigeria’s agricultural sector.
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The broader implication for the sector
Agriculture remains one of Nigeria’s most significant economic sectors, employing a large share of the population and contributing substantially to GDP. Yet small agribusinesses have historically struggled to access the kind of structured capacity building and funding that larger enterprises take for granted.
Initiatives like this signal a shift toward treating agric SMEs as serious commercial entities deserving of professional development support, not just beneficiaries of emergency relief.
The programme is also expected to include one month of post-bootcamp advisory support for all participants, extending the impact beyond the event itself.
