Unilag’s entrepreneurship centre empowered over 1,000 students with skills, funds

No fewer than 1,000 students of the University of Lagos (UNILAG) have benefited from training and financial support by the institution’s Entrepreneurship and Skills Development Centre, in efforts to nurture entrepreneurs and encourage job creation among undergraduates.

Sunday Adebisi, the director of UNILAG’s Entrepreneurship and Skills Development Centre, disclosed this to BusinessDay in an interview at the end of the institution’s third edition of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Business Certification (EIBIC) programme 2026.

According to Adebisi, the initiative has 13,000 first-year students participating in the compulsory programme. “The aim is to build the University of Lagos into Africa’s Silicon Valley,” he emphasised.

He revealed that the institution, through the centre, is grooming young CEOs, out of these people, and is creating startups that will create jobs.

“We’re creating a platform for them where we can help them to register their businesses, and also a platform where they can connect completely with the industry.

“Sahara has given opportunities to many of our students, and many other companies have given internships straight away to many of those students,” he said.

Besides, he explained that the centre has created a Fireside Chat, where students will sit at the feet of big CEOs to learn the possibility of creating what lasts.

He said this is because many of the students at that young age, when they are innocent, looking for what to do with their time, do not even know their rights from the left, hence, do not know that failure can be part of business success.

Adebisi emphasised the need for a ministry of SME as obtainable in South Korea. “Nigeria must create the ministry because it has 75 percent of its population among the youth that need to create these businesses, and these are the people that can either make or mar the nation,” he noted.

Johnson Samuel, the co-founder of WalterSam Technologies, shared his business trajectories right from his undergraduate days at Unilag, and how the institution’s entrepreneurship centre helped him become a better entrepreneur.

“I came into UNILAG in December 2017, and immediately after my 100- level exams, I was like, there are a lot of problems around me, and I cannot convert these problems into creating an enterprise.

“I couldn’t leverage these challenges that students are facing to create wealth for myself. That was how I started, and I came up with a business. The business name is WalterSam Services,” he said.

He explained that there were over 40,000 undergraduates, and the bed-spaces on campus then were about 8,000, which means that less than 20 percent of the students could actually get accommodation on campus, while the majority, over 32,000 students, had to find accommodation off campus.

“We started by solving accommodation problems for students in the university; we were connecting students with private hostel owners,” he noted.

Samuel disclosed that his team later discovered another problem, which was overcrowded classrooms, and started providing educational products and services for students to help them to prepare well for exams.

Speaking on how the university supported him, he said, “In 2021, at the maiden edition of the University of Lagos Business Innovation and Talent Expression Competition (BITES), I happened to be the winner of the grand finale of the competition.

“Through this competition, I was able to get N2 million equity-free grants. With this N2 million equity-free grant, one of our products is educational books, and with the grant, we’re able to buy a multifunctional printer that could help us produce the book by ourselves,” he said.

Furthermore, the university has also created an enabling environment in terms of the ecosystem designs, in the sense that, so now, what we are working on currently, which is the bigger picture, you know, I just said that we started, you know, from solving small educational problems and all.

Ndumele Favour, also a postgraduate student at the UNILAG Entrepreneurship and Skill Development Centre, said one of the reasons she picked the course was that it was quite peculiar.

“I have a background in education, and I needed something else, hence, I felt like entrepreneurship, aside from the fact that many people go for medicine or to become a lawyer, this is one aspect that many people fail to realise that there is so much potential in.

“Since I joined UNILAG for this master’s course, I’ve learnt that when you find yourself in an environment, you have to find the problem and create a solution. Another thing that I learned is that when you’re diving into business, you have to have the notion that you’re going to fail,” he explained.