By Ifeanyi Chukwu
For many years, some government sponsored empowerment programmes in Nigeria have selected women entrepreneurs based on an existing conventional criteria. This involves the quality of a business plan, the sector, the location, and whatever prior trading experience an applicant could show.
But a recent findings at the office of Osun State Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare indicates otherwise. An official of the ministry who spoke on anonymity, said those criteria kept producing an inconsistent result, noting that applicants who looked strong on paper, entered programmes and struggled. While others with thinner credentials outperformed expectations.
The official also noted that completion rates stalled, and businesses did not survive at the rate the programmes were designed to produce. But in, 2023 the ministry changed what it screens for.
In these findings, Zainab Aderinwale, a Nigerian researcher working on founder psychology, developed a framework measures called Passion, Problem, Solution (PPS) as a solution based approach to change the narrative.
What the framework measures apply: It assesses prospective entrepreneurs on three dimensions before they enter a programme or receive support.
‘Passion,’ in the framework’s use of the term, is not enthusiasm. It is the durability of a founder’s intrinsic motivation whether commitment can survive the long stretch before a business finds footing. ‘Problem,’ on the other hand, asks how deeply the entrepreneurs understand things they propose to fix, and whether that understanding comes from proximity to the people living with it rather than from assumption, while ‘Solution,’ in the context, interrogates whether the proposed path is coherent and feasible against the problem as it actually exists.
Summing up, Aderinwale argues that the three produce a reading of psychological readiness that conventional selection criteria do not capture, and that this readiness shapes outcomes before funding, training or market access enters the picture.
How Osun adopted it: The Ministry came across the framework through a Guardian Nigeria feature, De-risking Venture Building Through Founder Evaluation and Psychological Insight, published on September 9, 2023. Senior officials at the Ministry, reviewed the methodology and concluded it addressed a gap in their own process.
That process had assessed what applicants brought with them ideas, sectors, experience without any systematic read on where an applicant stood relative to the demands of structured enterprise development.
Adoption was formalised in a letter from the Ministry’s permanent secretary, Barrister Abimbola Babatunde, issued on Ministry letterhead from the Office of the Permanent Secretary.
Since incorporating the framework, the Ministry says it has recorded a 20 percent increase in programme completion and business sustainability outcomes. It also, said that it has applied the framework across multiple cycles reaching more than 1,000 women entrepreneurs in the State supported initiatives, and has retained it as its ongoing evaluation methodology.
Accordingly, the Ministry record, described that participants have moved on to build businesses in food processing, textile production, agricultural supply and retail trade, while several others moved from sole proprietorships to enterprises employing between two to ten people in their communities.
The researcher
Zainab Aderinwale holds a degree in psychology from Obafemi Awolowo University. Her argument is that the decisive question in entrepreneurship development is not whether a business idea is sound but whether the founder is equipped to carry it, and that the question belongs before the funding and before the training rather than after.
Why it matters: Selection is where scarce public resources are committed. A ministry with a fixed number of training places and a fixed budget is making a bet each time it admits someone, and until recently it was making that bet on the strength of a form.
The Osun figures are the Ministry’s own, drawn from a single State’s programme cycles, and they do not settle whether psychological screening works as a general proposition.
What the adoption does show is that a government programme operating at scale found its selection process to be a variable it could change and that it has kept the change.
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