Kenneth Leadership Academy

Small  businesses account for 80% of the total enterprises in Nigeria, but fail within five years.

This is due to a myriad of factors, but lack of funding and leadership are key reasons why these businesses fail. Most small businesses find it difficult to access funding or capital due to high interest rates and risk assessment by conventional banks. These businesses are often ran by young entrepreneurs who do not have a enough experience to manage resources and scale their businesses

Kenneth Leadership Academy seeks to solve this problem by providing a hybrid system that discovers, develop and mentor the next generation of African businesses. To achieve this we want to not only provide leadership but link them with funding opportunities and make them investment ready.

This solution would unlock economic prosperity of Nigeria and Africa at large. It would reduce illegal migration, poverty and youth unemployment in Africa.

According to the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics, Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in account for about 48% of National GDP, make up about 96% of business and 84% of employment. Despite it's contributions to the Nigerian economy, challenges still persist that hinders the growth and development of the sector.

These small businesses due to lack of finance and poor leadership, about 80% of them fail within the first five years. Most entrepreneurs running these businesses are not trained in the art of Entrepreneurship Management and lack the needed leadership skills to manage their enterprises. This contributes to the high risk assessment level to these businesses by conventional financial institutions who are already skeptical of providing capital to them. There is also the problem of high interest rate often charged by these financial institutions.

The countionus failure of small businesses in Nigeria would further worsen the already alarming rate of unemployment and poverty in Nigeria. These businesses are the major drivers of the Nigerian economy.

There's an urgent need to create an alternative model for financing small business.

Kenneth Leadership Academy is seeking to reduce the high rate small business failure in Nigeria by providing a platform for small businesses to access funding and mentorship.

The goal is to train entrepreneurs to develop the art of Entrepreneurship Management, Business Sustainability, Customer Development and prepare them to be investment ready.

Post training, we will connect them to alternative funding sources, by linking them to angel investors and venture capital firms for them to pitch their business solutions to them.

Also, we were provide post training mentorship to help them maximize the various targeted resources they received for the growth and expansion of their enterprises.

Leveraging on the, we will develop a digital community that connects entrepreneurs, investors, government agencies and professionals where they can interact and network and provide personalized trainings and targeted resources for small businesses. Our community would function as the "LinkedIn" for small businesses.

Our solution is targeting the over 20 million small businesses in Nigeria which account for 84% of employment.

Africa's most populous nation has the largest economy in Africa. Nearly a quarter of the population is out of work and 20% is under employed. For young people aged 15-35, 55.4% of them are out of work.

Our solution would unlock the economic potentials of Nigeria and Africa at large through the power of entrepreneurship

An integral part of developing our solution, was engaging these small businesses and entrepreneurs through both online and offline surveys, in order to design a solution that focuses on their needs.

Unlike various solutions for small businesses that focuses majorly on just capacity building for business owners, we are taking a step further in providing a community, a hybrid platform that provides access to patient capital and mentorship.

Our solution is a tech driven community that would leverages on artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide personalized, yet affordable and accessible solutions for small businesses to scale.

Kenneth Leadership Academy is still at the concept stage. We are currently serving over 100 small businesses, but we hope to grow this number to at least 1000 businesses within one year.

After five years we hope to be serving over a million small businesses within West Africa.

One goals for the next one year includes designing an home grown business curriculum that directly impacts the growth of over 1000 small businesses in Nigeria. Also, we hope to have fully developed a digital community that would connect small businesses and various stakeholders key to their development.

Our five vision is to unlock the potentials of 1 million small businesses in West Africa. We plan to achieve this through collaboration and Leveraging on the power of digital technology.

Lucky Sitta, Co- founder

Edoh Mercy

Our value proposition is to provide professional but personalized and affordable mentorship for small businesses who are interested to scaling their businesses.

To provide this service we will organize in-house and online trainings for small business owners. Our various digital platforms would also serve as a medium to reach out to these enterprises.

This would be a major breakthrough for small businesses in Nigeria because these enterprises are constantly in need of how to enhance business operations and growth, strategic marketing and brand management, business intelligence, analytics and insights, customer management, product development and how to scale their ideas.

We plan on raising capital through grants, donations and reach out to long term investors who would both mentor and fund the project. 

We will sustain our revenue stream through subscriptions on our digital platforms and charge fees for our trainings and mentorship services.

Other revenue streams include consulting for both non-profit and profit organizations, quality research services and project management for individuals and organizations.