Tony Elumelu

Tony Elumelu was born in 1963 in Jos, Nigeria, the son of a civil servant, and studied economics before entering banking at a relatively junior level in the 1980s. Nigerian banking at the time was widely seen as unstable and poorly regulated, with many small banks collapsing and eroding public trust, an environment that gave an ambitious young banker plenty of cautionary examples of how badly things could go wrong.

In 1997 he led a group that acquired a small, struggling bank and rebuilt it as Standard Trust Bank, growing it through careful management and expansion, before engineering a merger in 2005 with the much larger United Bank for Africa to create one of the biggest banking groups on the continent. Under his leadership UBA expanded aggressively into other African countries at a time when most Nigerian banks operated only domestically, betting that continental scale, not just national dominance, was where the real opportunity lay.

He stepped back from day-to-day banking leadership in 2010 to focus on investment and philanthropy, promoting a concept he called Africapitalism, the argument that private investment, not aid alone, should drive African development, with businesses expected to deliver both profit and measurable social benefit.

In 2015 he committed one hundred million dollars through the Tony Elumelu Foundation to identify, train and fund ten thousand African entrepreneurs across all fifty-four countries of the continent over a decade, one of the largest such philanthropic entrepreneurship programmes ever launched by an African businessman, reflecting his belief that the continent's growth depended on backing many small founders rather than a handful of large firms.