The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and Jesnoch International Limited have jointly opened applications for the Annual Youth in Agribusiness Innovation Contest, a national competition to find, train and finance young Nigerians building businesses in agriculture.
The contest is delivered by Plus Incubation Hub Nigeria Limited under the AGRA-funded project “Systems Strengthening for BDS Provision and Access to Finance for Ag-SMEs”.
Ten winners will receive seed funding, structured mentorship and introductions to financiers and off-takers.
Thirty finalists will pitch live in Lagos, and prizes will be conferred publicly at the National MSME Conference in Lagos.
Every applicant who passes the eligibility check will be invited to a free, nationwide Virtual Training Day on Saturday 17 October 2026, covering agribusiness fundamentals, financial literacy, access to finance and investment readiness. Sessions are recorded and shared so that applicants who cannot attend live can complete the modules in their own time.
A further 120 young people — 40 in each of Niger, Nasarawa and Kaduna — will receive two full days of intensive, in-person, hands-on training, delivered concurrently in all three states on Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 October 2026.
In-person places are offered to eligible applicants resident in each state in order of verified, complete submission, with standing floors of at least 12 women and at least 8 rural participants per state.
Selection for training is separate from the contest judging and carries no advantage in the competition.
The contest is national. Sixty per cent of finalist and training places are weighted towards Niger, Nasarawa and Kaduna, the focal states of the parent project. Applicants from every other state compete for the remainder on the same published rubric. The weighting is applied once, at a single declared stage of the selection process, and is set out in full in the contest rules on the portal.
The application is individual. One named person aged 18 to 35 applies, is assessed, pitches and is awarded. The registration requirement attaches to the business, not to the applicant, and exists for two reasons: seed funding must be paid to an entity that can lawfully receive and account for it, and SMEDAN’s mandate is the development of registered micro, small and medium enterprises.
Three routes are accepted because young agripreneurs in Nigeria legitimately trade under all three. Many operate as a CAC-registered business name or company. Some hold a SMEDAN MSME registration. And a very large number of young farmers in Niger, Nasarawa and Kaduna trade through a registered cooperative society, which is the predominant legal form in rural agriculture — recognising only CAC registration would exclude precisely the rural youth this programme exists to reach. Cooperative membership is accepted as evidence that the applicant’s agribusiness has a lawful trading vehicle. It does not make the application a group entry, and the cooperative is not the applicant.