Monsieur Le Ministre, Excellencies, friends.
Thank you to the French–African Foundation and to the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères.
I want to begin with where we are standing.
For a century and a half, the policy of France towards Africa was written in this building. Much of that history we know. Some of it we are still arguing about. I do not pretend otherwise.
But I did not come to Paris to argue about the past. I came because of something I saw this morning.
A few hours ago, I was in a hall at Sciences Po with five thousand young people. African students. French students. Young men and women of the diaspora.
They had not come for a debate about history. They had come looking for opportunity, a mentor, an investor. Somebody to take a chance on them.
I know that feeling precisely.
I began my career in a job I was not formally qualified for. Someone looked at me, decided to take the risk, and gave it to me anyway.
Everything I have built since — a bank, an energy company, a foundation — began with one decision, by one person, who did not have to make it.
I was lucky.
But luck should not be the only way an African talent gets a chance. And so for fifteen years I have been trying to do one thing. To democratise that luck.
Last week we published our 15-year impact report. Since 2015, the Tony Elumelu Foundation has put more than one hundred and twenty million dollars — in five-thousand-dollar cheques — directly into the hands of over twenty-four thousand young entrepreneurs, in all fifty-four African countries.
They have created one and a half million jobs. Eighty-four per cent of them came to us with nothing but an idea.
This year, two hundred and sixty-five thousand young Africans applied to us. We could fund just about two thousand
That is not a continent looking for charity. That is a continent showing it is investable, entrepreneurial – that it is our future.
And France has been part of this.
In 2017, the Agence Française de Développement agreed to partner. Not to give. To share the risk — standing behind the banks that lend to our entrepreneurs.
A year later, on his first official visit to Nigeria, President Macron accepted our invitation and sat down in Lagos with two thousand Tony Elumelu entrepreneurs. Not with a government. With young African business owners — in a room hosted by an African foundation.
On the day he sat down with them, we had funded four thousand two hundred and fifty entrepreneurs.
Tonight the number is over twenty-four thousand.
That is what a partner looks like.
Aid asks what Africa needs. Partnership asks what Africa is building — and takes a share of the risk alongside it.
One creates dependency. The other creates companies, and employers, and taxpayers — the kind of prosperity that does not have to be renewed every budget cycle.
So let me make one request, in the most beautiful building in which I have ever looked for partnership.
Our seed capital has already proved the case. These entrepreneurs are investible, and we now have fifteen years of independently assessed evidence to show it.
To AFD, to Proparco, to Bpifrance — and to everyone in this room with capital to deploy: come and co-invest with us.
Not for Africa. With Africa.
Somebody did it for me.
Ladies and gentlemen — to Africa’s next champion, whoever and wherever she is.
Thank you.
