The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria has made a pointed and unusual admission: Nigeria’s startup funding problem is not primarily a shortage of capital, but a shortage of businesses capable of attracting and deploying it.
SMEDAN made the assertion at the launch of a two-week Training of Trainers programme in Abuja on Monday, under the Abuja Centre for Entrepreneurship Project — a $12 million initiative backed by the South Korean Government and implemented in partnership with the Korea International Cooperation Agency.
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What the ACE project is building
The Abuja Centre for Entrepreneurship is SMEDAN’s most ambitious capacity-building project to date, designed to address the quality gap in Nigeria’s entrepreneurship ecosystem rather than simply add more entrants to it. The Training of Trainers programme that commenced this week is the first implementation phase, selecting 30 participants from more than 1,100 applications received from across the country.
From the initial pool, the Project Management Consortium shortlisted 80 candidates across Business Management and Artificial Intelligence tracks before a further interview process produced the final 30. These participants will be certified as ACE entrepreneurship trainers and go on to equip a new generation of Nigerian founders with the skills to build scalable, technology-driven, and investment-ready businesses.
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The ACE Project will provide entrepreneurship education, digital innovation training, business incubation and acceleration, institutional capacity development, and policy support. Selected startup founders will later pitch their business models directly to international venture capitalists, with the programme designed to create a structured pathway from idea to investable enterprise.
Nigeria is Africa’s leading startup destination and home to five of the continent’s eight unicorns. That headline fact sits alongside the reality that most of Nigeria’s 40 million MSMEs cannot produce the documentation, governance structures, or growth projections that investors require. The ACE project is targeting the space between those two truths.
Why the investment-readiness diagnosis matters
SMEDAN’s Director, Onesi-Lawani, who represented Director-General Charles Odii at the programme launch, was direct about the structural problem. Funding exists. The Bank of Industry has disbursed over N600 billion. Development finance institutions, international donors, and private equity funds are actively seeking Nigerian deals. But a significant proportion of the businesses that approach those funding sources cannot demonstrate the financial records, operational structures, or scalable business models that justify investment.
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The ACE project’s response is to intervene at the trainer level — building capacity in the people who will then deliver entrepreneurship education at scale, across Fintech, Agritech, Healthtech, Logistics, and the Creative Economy. By training trainers rather than only training entrepreneurs directly, the programme aims to create a multiplier effect that extends its reach well beyond what a single cohort-based programme could achieve.
The ACE Centre building will be constructed at SMEDAN’s Industrial Development Centre in Abuja, with virtual training and advisory services available to entrepreneurs within three months of the project’s full launch.
The logic is straightforward: if the gap between Nigerian entrepreneurs and the capital available to them is a capability gap rather than a capital gap, the solution is better-equipped founders, not more funding announcements.
