On October 30, the Kuramo Foundation for Sustainable Development launched the WIIF SME Fund Accelerator in Lagos, bringing together 22 first-time and emerging fund managers selected from 84 applicants across all six of Nigeria's geopolitical zones. The 12-week programme covers investment theses, financial modelling, fundraising, pipeline development, legal structuring, and exit strategies. The idea is simple: before money moves, the people managing it need to be ready.
The Wholesale Impact Investment Fund sits behind this effort. A naira-denominated vehicle targeting $1 billion for Nigerian small businesses, WIIF is managed by Kuramo Capital Management and was established by the Impact Investors Foundation and the National Advisory Board on Impact Investing. Rather than investing directly in SMEs, it operates as a fund of funds, channelling capital into the intermediary vehicles that finance them.
The gap WIIF is trying to fill is significant. Nigeria has roughly 39.7 million micro, small and medium enterprises, and the IFC estimated in 2022 that they face an unmet financing need of $32.2 billion. Olamide Adeosun, vice president at Kuramo Capital, points to the first wave of Nigerian private equity firms like Verod and CardinalStone, and notes that a comparable generation of small business fund managers has simply not emerged behind them.
The fund is working toward a $100 million first close, which it has not yet reached. In June 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance announced a $50 million government commitment to the vehicle. Kuramo is also courting domestic pension funds and local development finance institutions as early institutional backers.
As Kuramo put it in a recent statement: "Capital deployed into managers who are not yet investment-ready does not create durable results." The accelerator is the bet that getting managers ready first is what makes the rest of it work.
Originally published by TechCabal.