IBS-YEDP: Ibadan Business School's Youth Entrepreneurial Development Programme
Across Nigeria, young people are already building something out of very little. They are selling, producing, trading, farming, designing, cooking, repairing, delivering, creating digital content, offering services, and starting small businesses in difficult and often unstructured conditions. What most of them lack is not ambition or hustle. What they lack is structure, mentoring, business discipline, financial literacy, compliance knowledge, customer management skills, digital exposure, and access to practical advisory support. The Youth Entrepreneurial Development Programme (YEDP), was created to close exactly this gap. Organised by the School of Enterprise Management at Ibadan Business School, IBS-YEDP is a structured entrepreneurship development and business incubation programme designed for young and emerging entrepreneurs aged 18 to 40, equipping participants with the practical business management, financial, marketing, digital, compliance, and consultation support required to start, structure, manage, and grow sustainable businesses.
What Makes IBS-YEDP Different from Other Development Initiatives
IBS-YEDP is born directly out of Ibadan Business School's corporate social responsibility commitment to youth development, enterprise growth, and national economic empowerment. As part of this commitment, a programme that would ordinarily carry a commercial value of at least ₦2,000,000 — combining business training, enterprise incubation, mentoring, advisory services, business clinics, digital learning, practical tools, and pitch support — is being offered to participants at a highly subsidised access fee of only ₦50,000. This is not a discount in the ordinary commercial sense. It is a deliberate institutional decision by Ibadan Business School to make world-class entrepreneurship education and enterprise development support accessible to young Nigerians who, under normal commercial pricing, may never have had the opportunity to access training of this calibre. By absorbing the overwhelming majority of the true cost of delivery, Ibadan Business School is positioning YEDP not as a profit-driven course but as a genuine investment in Nigeria's youth and its enterprise economy.
Who YEDP Is For
The programme serves two categories of participants. For those with new business ideas, YEDP provides a structured pathway to validate the viability of an opportunity before committing significant time, money, or resources to it — reducing the risk of failure that comes from launching untested ideas. For those already running a business, whether in the formal or informal sector, YEDP offers knowledge across financial management and bookkeeping, legal advisory and compliance, business process optimisation, and marketing and customer acquisition. Participants are exposed to branding, sales, customer acquisition, bookkeeping, cash flow management, business registration, regulatory compliance, digital selling, business operations, and funding readiness. This combination matters because many small businesses in Nigeria do not fail for lack of a good idea; they fail because the
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Start your entrepreneurship journey with Ibadan Business School's Youth Entrepreneurial Development Programme.