LSETF Partners Firm on Capacity Building
The Lagos Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) has gone into partnership with Intense, a technology firm to organise a capacity building programme known as intense social engineering.
Speaking at the event in Lagos recently, the Head, Lagos Innovates, Tosin Faniro-Dada, said LSETF shares the vision with Intense to provide financial support to residents of Lagos state, to tackle unemployment and wealth creation.
Faniro-Dada explained that the initiative was designed to assist founders and start-ups by facilitating access to high quality workspaces and infrastructure, learning, early stage investment capital and investor and peer networks.
She added that programmes are open to all innovation-driven enterprises that are less than three years old and based in Lagos State.
According to her, “LSETF aims to enhance the creative and innovative energies of all Lagos residents and reduce unemployment across the State. The Fund has the mandate to directly invest N25 billion in helping Lagos residents grow and scale their Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) or acquire skills to get better jobs.
“LSETF will focus on promoting entrepreneurship by improving access to finance, strengthening the institutional capacity of MSMEs and formulating policies designed to improve the business environment in Lagos state.”
In his remarks, the Chief Marketing Officer of Intense, Leye Makanjuola, said the vision of the group is to support the founders of technology companies by equipping them with resources, training, mentorship and funding required in building global technology companies such as Uber, Amazon and Flipkart in the next 10 years.
Makanjuola stated that founders of a lot of technology start-ups don’t create time to interact, share ideas and learn in order to improve their skills, pointing out that interaction and networking are important to scale growth.
“In our years of doing business in Nigeria, we found out that a lot of technology startups founders are always busy with work.
“They don’t realise that networking and interaction are very important. People made mistakes that could have been avoided”, he said even as he noted that Intense Social Engineering was conceptualized to create a community startup founders can call home.
Makanjuola stated that the capacity building aims to contribute positively to the Nigerian economy through the development of successful technology companies that can compete favourably internationally.
Some of the speakers at the event were Olufisayo Oludare of Advancio Interactive, a Fintech startup; Ayo Akinola of Piggy Bank, a saving solution; Chukwuwezam Obanor of Prep class, an academic training solution; Olubusayo Longe of Form Plus, a start-up that builds easy to use forms and Chinedu Azodoh of Max, a technology company disrupting the transporting and logistics industry.