Recently, I’ve been discussing with some angel investors, incubators and venture capitalists and its obvious that people are watching the Nigerian web space to identify innovations and entrepreneurial ideas that could be incubated or funded. In the coming months, I’ll be working with these individuals and companies to identify and develop entrepreneurs from Nigeria.

While there are a few challenges with VC funding in Nigeria, considering the fact that foreign investors need to be educated first about the trends and prospects in a given investment area, I’m also interested in seeing every big business in Nigeria loan a small fund to kick-start a small business start-up. Is this possible?

Apart from start-up funding, young entrepreneurs in Nigeria need some help in learning how to set up and grow a real online business start-up. Thus, there is a need for training of software enthusiasts in Nigeria on the newest web applications.

John Balen of Canaan Partners said, “It’s hard for large VC funds to invest in small enterprises.” If that is true for global start-ups, how much more for African start-ups or even Nigerian start-ups? Erik Hersman of White African suggests that Africa should figure out a way to foster earlier stage investments as a community of smaller investors. Jonathan Gosier of Appfrica suggested a few ideas for ventures which includes Micro-Angel Investor/VC (i.e African-owned Angel Investors) and provided an example of Martin Fisher’s Kickstart.org, a trend which I believe will spread to other African countries in the future.

Some social entrepreneurs in Africa have developed Y-Combinator style venture funding groups or communities, which makes me wonder if this can work in Nigeria? An example is Appfrica.org founded and personally funded by Jon Gosier. It facilitates, mentors and incubates software entrepreneurs in East Africa. Their goal is to offer a physical space with a solid internet connection, servers, software and computers that will allow students and recent graduates a place to develop their ideas in a constructive environment outside of school.

Personally, I’m keen to see how this can be done in Nigeria. For me, it will be interesting to be involved with sourcing for home-grown talents in IT/software and web developers with an understanding of open source and wikis as well as other web applications. Then, we can develop these talents and showcase their start-ups and applications to the world.

If you are an individual, group, community or organisation and are interested in developing local software developers from Nigeria, I’ll be happy to discuss with you further.