BGIS closes 2025 programme with reception and premiere of Women Who Build documentary
BGIS wrapped up its 2025 programme in Lagos with the premiere of Women Who Build, spotlighting 14 women-led startups and ending with a Deal Day where founders pitched directly to investors.
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The Business Growth Initiative for Startups (BGIS) held its official programme reception on December 12, 2025, marking the close of its 2025 cohort and the premiere of its documentary, Women Who Build. <br />
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The event brought together founders, investors, ecosystem leaders, and programme partners in Lagos.<br />
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BGIS is a women-focused scale-support programme funded by the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the UK-Nigeria Tech Hub, an initiative of the Digital Access Programme (DAP). The programme is implemented by Ubulu Development Foundation (UBDEV) and Spurt!. It was designed to support women-led, growth-stage startups in Nigeria with structured advisory, visibility, and strategic support to enable sustainable scaling.<br />
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Over five months, the programme worked with 14 women-led startups operating across sectors, including fintech, edtech, food, healthtech, AI, SaaS, logistics, creative commerce, and community health.<br />
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BGIS 2025 at a glance<br />
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The reception opened with remarks from Odiong Akpan, Chief Executive Officer of Ubulu Development Foundation, who reflected on the purpose of the BGIS programme and its focus on addressing structural gaps affecting women-led startups in Nigeria. <br />
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He described BGIS as a pilot model and encouraged ecosystem stakeholders to adopt similar approaches in supporting female founders. <br />
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“This programme was developed to do one thing: to provide additional support to female-led startups and founders. And that is because in the startup and innovation ecosystem, we have a lopsided representation, with few women-led businesses. And in instances where there is funding, we see some people just paying lip service to the support they provide women-led businesses,” Odiong said.<br />
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While noting the close of the cohort’s formal activities, he reaffirmed the partners’ commitment to continued engagement with the founders and broader ecosystem collaboration.<br />
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A key segment of the event was a one-on-one conversation between Folake Kofo-Idowu, F...
