She Leads Africa has just opened applications for the 2017 She Leads Africa Accelerator, a 3-month program designed to identify, support and fund the next generation of Nigeria’s brightest entrepreneurs. She Leads Africa  is a social enterprise dedicated to supporting young African women and their journey towards professional success through online content and offline programmes.

SLA’s 2017 Accelerator will take place in 4 locations across Nigeria – Abuja, Lagos Island, Lagos Mainland, and Kaduna.

The 2017 Accelerator will consist of 1 week residencies in the four locations where entrepreneurs will receive training from the SLA team and business leaders and experts. During these residencies, entrepreneurs will be focused on business strategy, growth, marketing, finance and distribution. They will also receive a host of on and offline training as well as an opportunity to pitch their business to national and international investors.

This 2017 SLA Accelerator is run in partnership with the Work in Progress! Alliance – a consortium of Oxfam, Butterfly Works and VC4A focused on driving job creation and youth employment in Nigeria.

The Work in Progress! Alliance is focused on unlocking the economic potential of young women and men in Egypt, Nigeria and Somalia. The project aims to enable them to generate sustainable and living incomes – by finding regular employment or starting enterprises. Alliance partners include Oxfam, VC4A (Venture Capital for Africa) and Butterfly Works. As part of the project, VC4A partners with local accelerators and works to strengthen local investor networks.

Apply Here – Due  25 June 2017 at 11:59pm WAT. 

When the pundits first said “Every company is a tech company,” it sounded like buzzword blather—until people realized it’s true. These days, companies in any industry—from media to retail—must make technology a core competency if they want to succeed.

And now the same is becoming true of cyber security. Once, it was only a handful of industries such as banking or technology that needed to make security a fundamental part of what they do. Today, everyone else does too. Do you doubt it? Just look at the terrible ransomware attacks that crippled hospitals and major companies like FedEx across the world on Friday—attacks that probably could have been prevented if they had updated their Windows software.

Being good at cyber security may not give a company a competitive edge in the market, but it will prevent security catastrophes, which is just as important. The question is how to achieve this.

People like Oren Falkowitz, the CEO of anti-phishing service Area 1, insist that technology provides the best route to cyber safety, arguing it’s impractical to train everyone in an organization to be good at security. Meanwhile, companies like Cloudflare are proposing industry wide approaches—like an initiative to create VPN-style protection for the Internet of Things—to make connected devices less dangerous.

These are fine approaches, but I can’t shake the impression that corporate culture must be part of the mix too. I recall how it was once okay for those of us in the media to ignore new technology (“why do I need that? I’m a writer!”), but now the industry treats tech literacy as a core part of a journalist’s job.

I get the feeling the same thing will happen when it comes to cyber security. So many cyber disasters are based on exploiting people’s lack of knowledge about elementary ideas like software updates or email attachments. Successful companies of the future may be those in which everyone in the organization has a basic level of cyber literacy.

Sure, that’s easier said than done. But at this point, companies and organizations have no choice.

by Jeff John Roberts

Buhari Administration has made it clear that the future of Nigeria is going to be driven by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).  The country needs to build next generation companies that will help provide jobs and opportunities for the citizens. Bank of Industry (BOI) got that memo and seems poised to do what it was set up to do in the first place.

Mr Waheed Olagunju, Acting Managing Director, Bank of Industry says the bank will assist Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with N376 billion (about $1.24 billion) before the end of 2019.

Olagunju spoke in Makurdi while presenting a paper entitled; “Target Financing for SMEs’’ at a management retreat for officers of the ministry and its parastatal agencies.

According to Olagunju, disbursement to SMEs increased from a record of N5.64 billion in 2015 to N8.02 billion as at end of 2016, while for 2019 we are targeting N376 billion.

If you check the details, he may be bragging here as there is no way he can have that kind of budget. It will be extremely challenging to move from N8 billion in 2016 to N376 billion in 2019. Nigeria does not have that capacity.

But we hope he can prove everyone wrong! Should that be executed, it will be fair to say that Nigeria will return to a golden age of entrepreneurship as funding will be available for companies to expand.