The Wholesale Impact Investment Fund (WIIF), a naira-denominated vehicle targeting $1 billion for Nigerian small businesses, has begun training the fund managers it may eventually back.
On October 30, the Kuramo Foundation for Sustainable Development launched the WIIF SME Fund Accelerator in Lagos, onboarding 22 first-time and emerging managers selected from 84 applicants across all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones.
Established by the Impact Investors Foundation and the National Advisory Board on Impact Investing, the vehicle is managed by Kuramo Capital Management. Alongside its capital commitments, Kuramo is conducting a 12-week accelerator programme for the cohort, covering investment theses, financial modelling, fundraising, pipeline development, legal structuring, and exit strategies.
The fund is working toward a $100 million first close, which it has not yet reached, according to Olamide Adeosun, director at Kuramo Capital, who spoke on behalf of the fund.
Nigeria has about 39.7 million micro, small and medium enterprises, and the International Finance Corporation estimated in 2022 that they face an unmet financing need of $32.2 billion. Adeosun points to the first wave of Nigerian private equity managers, firms such as Verod and CardinalStone, and says a new generation of small business fund managers has not followed. WIIF wants to change that by training and funding the next generation of small business funds.
In June 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance announced that the government would commit $50 million to the vehicle. Adeosun added that the fund is currently courting domestic pension funds and local development finance institutions as early institutional backers.
Rather than investing directly in small businesses, WIIF operates as a fund of funds, deploying capital into the intermediary vehicles that finance them.
“Capital deployed into managers who are not yet investment-ready does not create durable results,” read a statement shared by Kuramo Capital.
Ijeoma Madueke, the sustainable finance lead of the Kuramo Foundation, says the accelerator’s main test is investment readiness: documents in place, a clear thesis, and a team in sight. For WIIF, Adeosun said success would be two funds from the cohort that WIIF can back or two or more that raise money from outside investors. A 10% hit rate would be “fantastic”, he said.
In this conversation, Adeosun and Madueke explain how WIIF has approached raising money, why the accelerator took in 22 managers, how the programme chose them, what the training covers, and what “investment ready” means.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIIF is described as a billion-dollar fund denominated in naira. How much has been committed so far, and what has the process of raising it been like?
Olamide Adeosun: We set out to raise a billion dollars. What we are telling people, and what we are targeting, is $100 million for the first series. We are treating it as a $100 million fund, because a billion dollars is a very large number. That money is for micro, small and medium enterprises.
We chose a fund-of-funds approach because we wanted to reach as many businesses as possible. We invest in other funds, and those funds raise more money and invest in the businesses.
At the moment, we are raising from catalytic investors, meaning investors willing to take early risk, and from pension funds. We are talking to Nigerian development finance institutions and to international foundations that work on the continent. We have not made a first close yet.
In those talks, what investors want to see is a track record. Who are you going to invest in? That is why we use what we call the ABCD approach to building markets, which the Kuramo Foundation developed.
Think about the first wave of private equity managers in Nigeria, firms such as Verod and CardinalStone. We are trying to build the next generation of small business fund managers. When did you last hear of someone launching a new fund to invest in small businesses? You see many new venture funds and many tech founders, but small business funds are rare. That is the problem we are trying to solve. The accelerator will build and identify a pipeline of opportunities, and the Kuramo Foundation runs it.
More than 20 managers are in the accelerator. Why so many, and what was Kuramo trying to achieve?
Ijeoma Madueke: One point to clarify: these are the fund managers in the accelerator, and not all of them will receive money from the fund. In markets that are less developed, you often have to build before you can invest. We are building the bridge as we go. Many of these managers have not finished setting up their funds, so for some we are doing more incubation than acceleration. We have 22.
We wanted variety. If small businesses are the backbone of the economy, the managers who fund them should reflect that. We accepted funds in many sectors, including niche ones such as the creative economy, where we have two managers. One manager has a multi-product strategy built entirely on Islamic financial products. Not everyone will get funded, and not everyone will finish setting up a fund, so we wanted enough managers to give us a real pipeline once capital is ready.
We also spread the managers across the country. A lot of capital concentrates in Lagos, so we have managers from the north, south, east and west. We are looking at markets that capital has not traditionally reached, which we would call Nigeria’s secondary markets, where fund managers are doing exciting things.
The ABCD framework came from Kuramo Capital’s work. After mobilising millions of dollars for funds across the continent, we saw a gap for women-led funds and set up a gender-lens platform under what we call the ABCD framework: Accelerate, Bridge, Catalyze and Develop. If funds do not exist, we need to create them and help them reach investment readiness. That is the accelerate side, and it is what the Kuramo Foundation does.
Bridge and catalyse is about capital. Take the manager building an Islamic products fund. That is niche and untested in fund management. We see a lot of activity in commercial banking, bonds and sukuk, but much less in private equity and venture capital. Can we offer facilities that bridge them? Warehousing and working capital facilities help managers build the track record that investors want and test their ideas.
Development is about support. Emerging managers do not have the depth that a firm like Kuramo Capital has, so we provide shared services such as legal support and fund administration.
We ran earlier cohorts for women-led funds in Cape Town and Nairobi. This is the first time we are doing this in Lagos and the first time for a wholesale impact fund focused on small businesses.
Olamide Adeosun: To add to that, WIIF will invest in about 10 to 12 managers across the country, and we will target a good share of them to be emerging managers. A large part of building that pipeline is the work Ijeoma described and the programme the Kuramo Foundation is running for these managers.
How did you select the managers?
Ijeoma Madueke: Eighty-four applied. We looked first for differentiated strategies.
Even for an emerging manager, we asked, ‘What is your fund targeting?’ What problem are you solving? Are you solving it in a differentiated way, and are you set up to execute? I had first thought we wanted people who had everything in place, but many emerging managers are subject matter experts, such as engineers, who have not done financing before. Structure was one test among several. You can set up an advisory board and an investment committee and do all the supporting things, but the core question is your fund thesis. Why are you the right person to be the general partner of this fund, and what makes you different?
We had about three people on the panel for each interview and a scoring method. We also looked at whether the structure behind a fund could actually come to life. That weeded out quite a few applicants. We widened the cohort in places because we saw potential and wanted a bigger pipeline. We also considered fit with the sector. For example, one manager is working on healthcare financing linked to outcomes, which shows some of the innovative structures coming into the sector.
What would count as success for WIIF and the technical assistance facility?
Ijeoma Madueke: For the technical assistance facility, success means getting a few things right. The ideal measure would be a manager reaching a first close or raising a first cheque, but fundraising cycles are long, so that will take time. We look at clarity: a clear fund thesis, a clear approach and structures that can absorb capital, whether it comes from WIIF or elsewhere. The test is whether a manager is investment-ready by the end of the programme. That depends on how committed a manager is and how ready they are for the journey.
We have also given reality checks. One speaker at the in-person session told the cohort he sold his house to keep fundraising going for around six years. We want managers to know how long and how much work this takes, so they can decide whether to go ahead.
Olamide Adeosun: We also had investors in the room, including a pension fund on the panel, so prospective managers could hear directly what a pension fund wants to see before it gives money. That was invaluable.
For us, success means we can invest in a couple of the funds that come out of the accelerator. If two or more of them go on to raise money from outside investors, that validates the foundation’s work and the selection of managers, because it shows they are investable. One panellist told us that when they look at investments, they examine 100 and fund two, a 2% success rate. Against that, a 10% success rate for managers would be an amazing achievement.
Can you walk me through the training and the timeline?
Ijeoma Madueke: The programme runs 12 weeks and wraps up in December. We take managers through each component of setting up and running a fund. Some of it was in person, and we are now going deeper. We look at the fund thesis and the fund model, and we advise on what to adjust. We look at how managers approach fundraising and what their pitch decks look like. We pair them with mentors who have made a similar journey. We look at building the right team, which is tricky for emerging managers because talent is hard to find and hard to scale up.
We also cover pipeline: how to source deals and how to run diligence. We cover the legal and back-end side, meaning agreements, key terms and the shared service providers that can support a fund as it runs.
On fundraising, we explain which investors to approach. A pension fund is an unlikely investor for an emerging manager at this stage, but we wanted the managers to see what is possible. The right early capital comes from foundations and impact investors, who are willing to take a risk and often give concessional capital, meaning capital on softer terms. We also walk managers through the types of capital available to them: the working capital and warehousing that Kuramo offers, technical assistance, and actual capital through WIIF.
You can imagine the volume of material over such a stretch. That is why we call it a boot camp.
One element gets too little attention: trust. An investor gives money to a manager they trust, and trust comes from communicating your thesis clearly, so the investor does not feel they will lose their money. Fundraising is a long relationship, and we train managers on this too.
How are you thinking about exits?
Ijeoma Madueke: Exits come up in many of our conversations with investors, and a big part of my work at the foundation is raising investors’ confidence to invest in Africa, which depends on exits. For these managers, we bring in specialists who have done exits, and we run masterclasses on exit strategy. That is easier here because these managers have not deployed capital yet, so exit planning can shape their strategy from the beginning. We are building that into the curriculum.
You mentioned managers being “investment ready”. What does that mean?
Ijeoma Madueke: From the accelerator’s side, it means that if an investor wants to look at your fund as an opportunity, they can. You have the documentation in place, you can be shortlisted, and you can go through due diligence. If you lack those things, investors will not put you in their pipeline, and you are not investment-ready.
Olamide Adeosun: That is it. Your documents are ready, your strategy is clear, and you have a strong pipeline of investment opportunities. You also have a line of sight on the team you are trying to build, and your thesis is well thought through.
Why do you think the accelerator matters?
Ijeoma Madueke: There are businesses to fund, and that is why the accelerator matters. We are supporting fund managers who are trying to do something for small businesses in Nigeria. You can always invest in infrastructure or in fintechs, where scale is easy to see. Small businesses need innovation in how aligned capital reaches them. Programmes like this start to bridge the gap in formal and structured financing for what we say is 90% of Nigerian businesses.
What these managers are doing is hard. When we say they need to be investment-ready, we are talking about small businesses that keep their money under the pillow, that do not want to scale or take formal capital, and that do not want to hear the word ‘equity’ or the word ‘debt’. These managers are educating those businesses, setting up structures and investing their money in the effort. I do not want us to breeze past that. It is important to understand the scale of the work, and I hope programmes like this can support them as an extension of their teams as they navigate what is still a new environment.