Digital NLAS Community

Africa, especially Nigeria, has a large informal sector market consisting of entrepreneurs that are mostly unemployed youths and needing business advisory, financial and capacity-building supports.

The Shaveh Consulting digital MSMEs Hub started in 2019 to train some of these entrepreneurs at no cost. We started operating the digital Network-Learn-Act-Scale (NLAS) community as a means of imbibing a culture and a sense of sustainable business growth in the minds of the entrepreneurs. Our initiative is targeted at supporting the informal sector entrepreneurs to build lasting firms that can become large employers of labor in the soonest future and earn a viable means of livelihoood. We have seen persons start their business, and others scaling, by adopting our various MSMEs toolkits. 

We are confident that our solution can support entrepreneurship growth across Africa. Our market is large and open. Our model is working presently in Nigeria and it can work across Africa.

The problem we are trying to solve include (i) short life span and under-performance of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria (ii) inability of the MSMEs to transit progressively along the life cycle of their existence (iii) the need for more private sector involvement in providing business advisory, financial and capacity-building supports in the MSMEs sector.

Presently, 37.07 million MSMEs in Nigeria, accounting for more than 84 percent of jobs (SMEDAN / NBS, 2013). Micro enterprises account for the bulk of the MSMEs in Nigeria, with 36,994,578 enterprises (about 99.8 per cent), while small enterprises took 68,168, and medium enterprises 4,670.

The operators in the MSMEs sector of Nigeria are mostly unemployed youths with a zeal to become economically engaged; they have ideas but do not have a clear understanding about how to translate their ideas into businesses. Others have started their businesses but are limited in financial management skills and requisite managerial skills for managing economic challenges and scaling. 

We understand that the starting point for solving the problems above is to create a community where these MSME operators can cultivate financial and diverse managerial skills to support their businesses. Our solution started by developing the earlier explained NLAS model, which has been operating since 2019 and has supported a number of existing businesses. Our model has also helped persons with ideas, to begin to implement such ideas by starting their businesses. Presently, our virtual MSMEs Hub trains around 120 business operators monthly at no cost.

Our solution is promoting new venture creation, reducing poverty and supporting decent livelihood.

Our NLAS support entreprises that operate on lean budgets and yet advance business growth. The economy of Nigeria appear to be very expensive, hence challenging for starters. Because of financial liitations, we teach our community members how to operate on lean budgets, yet, survive. We share our personal story of how Shaveh started since 2016 and is survivng. We demonstrate how our practical lean operations as a company still serve as manifestations of the practicality of our teaching and MSMEs toolkits.

the NLAS odel supports a virtual MSMEs Hub where business operators network, and hence can share explicit and tacit knowledge with one another, they learn and they are encouraged to acts and expect to scale. They are mentored through these phases.

Our solution is already gathering evidences of success. We currently have business operators who are operating with our products.

Hence, haven gained success stories from the present mentees on our NLAS virtual community, we can be sure that scaling into other regions across Nigeria and largely into Africa will produce success stories through strategic implementations.

Our community is a social network platform. We adopted this model of operation so that we can be accessible by everybody of interest to our community. It has been effective for our community members and for us too.

Our community operates on any device social media platform. So the users operate according to their most prefered communication technology.

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Our community platform supports users to call frequently to ask questions and get additional support that can help their businesses. We often use the domestic language to communicate with users who are not too fluent in speaking or understanding English language

We currently serve 120 business operators montly. In the next one year we look forward to increasing to 500. And in five years we hope to serve 3,000 - 5,000 operators.

1. We hope to increase our network to 500 within the next year

2. We hope to start offering grant opportunities, and/or loans to support members of our NLAS community

3. We have our focus on a regional penetration, covering some west African states, in the next five years

4. We look forward to start counting profits from our model

1. We need funds to employ more staff to support our operations, update our technologies, and support operational & administrative costs

2. We need funds to support our updated website design

3. We need funds to support the members of NLAS community

1. We seek funding supports

2. Meanwhile, we keep leveraging on support from units that are within our company

3. We leverage on running more subsidised workshops/training

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Full-time: 2

Part-time (Volunteers): 3

My team consists of experienced and in-training entrepreneurs with a track record of businesses that each of us have started at some point.

Ibidunni, A.S. the CEO has more than 10 years of experience operating different businesses in the service sector: cleaning services, management consulting, and retail business

Ibidunni, O. M. has also been involved with stationery business and now is fashion business

Sosanwo, D. operates a professional legal services firm

Oluyode, E. operates an inter-state delivery services business

Badero, T. operates a fashion retail business

To support other arms of our company like the research arm and industry training, we partner with the Institute of Managerial Economists, Nigeria to execute workshops, and Kahterine Oxford, Nigeria to execute training for industry clients.

Our core business is to provide advisory services and capacity building to MSME operator t support their need for higher levels of performance and business survival. We are keen about offering free training / workshops to achieve this goal. This is along side free mentoring sessions that we offer as part of our value proposition. Alternatively, we support our clients bu offering highly subsidized workshops.

Our business is funded by our innovative means of lean operations. We leverage also on the funds that we get from our paid workshops. The bulk of our funding come from the research and training units of the company.

No grant has been earned yet. Our company consist of the research & data analytics, industry training and entrepreneurship & enterprise development units.

The bulk of our funding comes from the later two units. 

We hope to raise USD 50,000 to support our free training / workshops at the entrepreneurship & enterprise development unit of our company

Our estimated expenses for 2020 is USD 400. This covers rent, electricity, training / workshop publicity, facilitators' honorarium, financial support / grants to members of our NLAS community, expanding our operations to cover other africa regions

We are competing for the Mission Billion Challenge WURI West Africa Prize because 

1. We hope to raise fund to cover a larger regional base across Africa with our novel NLAS model

2. We hope to support our NLAS community members financially by offering grant opportunities and loans

3. The prize from here will support our office rental and help us acquire modern technologies that support our operations