Nolton Africa Growth Session Series 1
Theme: How To Raise Your First $20,000 Dollars as a Social Enterprise.
Speaker: Samirah Bello, Global Head Of Partnerships, ThriveAgric.
Content Outline:
- Part 1: Before you seek funding.
Before You Raise a Dime: Samirah Bello on How to Test Your Idea the Smart Way.
Start Where you are.
When you truly need Capital. - Part 2: Lessons From ThriveAgric.
Your story is your first asset.
Team experience matters more than you think.
Consistency is the long game. - Part 3: What funders are actually looking for.
Know what you’re asking for before you ask.
Do the internal work first.
Match your funding to your stage and structure.
Do not put your organization in a box. - Part 4: Systems that attract funding
Documentation is key.
Your clock starts when you register.
Build Yourself alongside your business. - Final Conclusion
You can raise your first $20,000 Dollars as a Social Enterprise.
PART 1:
Before You Raise a Dime: Samirah Bello on How to Test Your Startup Idea the Smart Way
One of the most persistent myths in the startup world is that you need money before you can start.
Samirah Bello, Global Head of Partnerships at ThriveAgric, is pushing back on that narrative, and her argument is hard to dismiss.
Speaking at a recent Nolton Africa webinar, Bello laid out a practical, three-part framework for founders at the earliest stages of building.
Her central message: money is rarely the first resource you need, and assuming otherwise is one of the most common and costly mistakes early-stage founders make.
Start Where You Are
Before anything else, Bello urges aspiring founders to earn their idea.
“Work or volunteer in a place that you think is the future business you want to create,” she advised.
This isn’t just about learning the industry; it’s about buying yourself time and resources. A stint in your target sector, even as an intern, gives you two things money can’t buy at the outset: on-the-ground insight and the ability to save.
This matters because too many founders pour funds into ideas they haven’t actually lived. Testing an untested concept is expensive. Testing one you understand deeply is not.
Ask: What Can You Build Without Spending a Naira?
Once you’re ready to test, Bello’s first question to founders is a sharp one: “When I map this idea out, what are the things I can do without having to put one Naira inside?”
Her answer often surprises people. For a tech product, for example, she points out that free AI tools can get you to a working prototype, and that partnerships and free trials can substitute for a paid customer base. “You can build it on free platforms,” she noted. “You don’t need to start building the entire thing because sometimes you would waste money building the entire thing and realize it’s not market fit.”
The goal at the idea stage isn’t a perfect product. It’s proof. One functional aspect of a product, tested with real potential users, tells you far more than a fully built solution sitting untested.
Collaboration, she adds, is an underused resource.
Equity agreements, revenue-share arrangements, and promise-based partnerships have helped many founders build products without upfront capital. “There are so many friends who have built products on that basis,” she said, on equity, shares, or future sales commitments.
When You Truly Need Capital
There are cases, Bello acknowledges, where capital is unavoidable, particularly for physical products that require development. In those situations, the conversation shifts to family, friends, and individual angel investors who back idea-stage companies.
She also points to structured opportunities like ThriveAgric’s own ATC programme, which offers up to ₦1.5 million to founders at idea stage, but with a key condition: the idea must have been tested. “If you’ve tested that idea, now that idea can attract funding,” she explained. Investors, even at early stages, want to see that a founder has done the hard work of validation first.
For founders searching for individual investors, Bello recommends starting closer than most expect: LinkedIn, mutual connections, and friends-of-friends networks are all viable channels at this stage.
A Word for Non-Profit Founders
Bello also addressed founders building in the social sector, offering a re-frame that applies well beyond NGOs: stop thinking of your organization as one that doesn’t make money.
“Think of it as a social enterprise that is making money,” she urged. Sustainability and impact are not in conflict. When a non-profit thrives financially, so do the communities it serves.
PART 2: Lessons from ThriveAgric
Samirah Bello has a front-row view of what it takes to build a company from nothing into a continental force. She joined ThriveAgric in December 2017, the same year it was founded, and has been embedded in the company’s fundraising journey ever since. Today, as head of the partnerships department.
She leads institutional investor relations for one of Africa’s leading Agri-tech companies, now operating across five African countries.
When she talks about what attracts investors, she’s not theorizing. She’s lived it.
Your Story Is Your First Asset
Once you’ve proven your concept, the next battle is narrative. “Every idea is a product, and every individual is a product,” Bello told the webinar audience.
The question every founder needs to answer is: how do you tell the story of that product?
For ThriveAgric, the answer was always rooted in one core mission, impact for smallholder farmers. No matter how the company evolved, how its business model shifted, or which new market it entered, that single story remained the anchor. “Whatever we’re doing, the story was impact for smallholder farmers,” Bello recalled. “It still went back to one core thing.”
That clarity paid off. As ThriveAgric told its story consistently, iterating it through feedback, adjusting it through growth-and investors followed. So did researchers and partners. Storytelling, in Bello’s experience, is not a one-time pitch exercise. It is an ongoing practice that runs in parallel with building. And it starts before you have a product.
“If you’re building a product, even if you don’t have a company or a website,” she challenged, “have you, as the individual building it, told the story so people know what you’re building?”
Team Experience Matters More Than You Think
Proof of concept and compelling storytelling will get you noticed. But the first thing most investors actually scrutinize is your team. “Giving you money is not the issue,” Bello said plainly. “The issue is: how can you manage that money? How can you scale?”
This is why she returns, again, to the importance of earning experience before launching. ThriveAgric’s founding team arrived from university with trading and business experience already behind them. The early staff, though fresh graduates, had racked up internships, volunteer stints, and stints at various organizations. None of them arrived empty-handed.
What investors are really asking when they assess a team is whether these people can navigate adversity. “If your idea does not work,” Bello explained, “does that mean that’s it? No. It means you should be fast-thinking enough to iterate that idea into something else that would work.”
A capable team signals resilience, and resilience is what carried ThriveAgric through the turbulence of COVID-19 while many of its peers in the Agri-tech space did not survive.
Consistency Is the Long Game
The third pillar Bello identifies is the one that is perhaps easiest to overlook, especially in the hustle of early-stage building: consistency.
Consistency in your customer numbers. Consistency in your impact metrics. Consistency in your team. Consistency in the quality of what you deliver. Consistency in telling your story. And critically, consistency in documentation.
“Documentation is crucial. As in very, very key,” she stressed. “From your financials, to your reports, to your social media documentation.” It doesn’t matter whether the money comes from a family member or an institutional fund, every naira should be accounted for with the same rigor.
This track record is what turns first-time investors into returning ones, which is precisely what ThriveAgric has built over the years.
The through-line here is trust. Consistency is simply trust, demonstrated over time. And when investors trust you, they trust your story, your team, and your numbers, the dynamic shifts. You stop chasing capital. Capital finds you.
“If you can do these three key things,” Bello concluded, “your story, your team, and the consistency of what you’re doing, before you know it, you won’t be asking people to give you money anymore.”
PART 3: What funders are actually looking for
Know What You’re Asking For Before You Ask
There’s a moment most founders dread: sitting across from an investor and being asked, “So, how much do you need, and what for?”
Samirah Bello’s advice is simple; that question should never catch you off guard. In fact, if it does, you’re not ready to fundraise yet.
In the third segment of Nolton Africa’s webinar, Bello shifted from the principles of building to the mechanics of raising, offering a remarkably practical roadmap for founders who are serious about attracting the right capital.
Do the Internal Work First
Before approaching a single investor, Bello insists founders must sit down and do their homework thoroughly and without rushing.
“Don’t go out to fundraisers until you do that first. The homework includes your financials, your projections, a clear articulation of your product, and a realistic picture of how you intend to scale.” She said.
This internal exercise does something critical: it tells you what kind of money you actually need. And that distinction, Bello warns, matters enormously. “Not every money should you accept. There are some money that will put you in trouble, there are some money that will buy you out, and there are some money that will not allow you to scale.” Walking into fundraising without that clarity means you risk taking on capital that works against you.
The question every founder should be able to answer confidently is: What do I want, how much do I want, and what do I need it for? Whether the answer is a loan, an equity stake, or a grant knowing your position before the conversation begins is, as Bello puts it, “the first level to fundraising.”
Match Your Funding Type to Your Stage and Structure
Once you know what you need, the next step is matching that need to the right funding vehicle. This is where many founders make a second mistake, assuming all funding opportunities are the same.
A tech startup exploring early validation might be better suited to a hackathon or accelerator program than a VC conversation.
An NGO might find more traction through grants, particularly if it operates within a recognized thematic area like women’s empowerment or youth development. A founder still in full-time employment needs to honestly ask whether they’re ready for an accelerator that requires full commitment from its founding team.
Bello also flagged something many founders overlook: the sheer volume of opportunities that go unanswered. She recalled a call for applications where only four or five people applied.
“People assume when they see these calls, ‘Is this real or not?'” Her counsel is direct, try everything. “It takes you nothing to go into all those things.”
Build a Board That Opens Doors
One of the more underrated pieces of Bello’s fundraising framework is the advisory board. Before going out to seek capital, she urges founders to ask themselves who should be backing them in an advisory capacity, not just for their knowledge, but for their networks and credibility.
“Your mentor, your dad’s friend, whoever is credible enough to be part of your advisors” these relationships function like references.
When an investor who doesn’t yet know you sees the people in your corner, it shifts the dynamic. You’re no longer an unknown quantity. You’re someone credible people have chosen to back.
Don’t Box Your Organization Into One Corner
Perhaps the most insightful moment of this segment came when Bello addressed a founder building an NGO around dance and performing arts as a tool for education and livelihoods, a model that sits outside the typical Nigerian NGO playbook.
Her response cut to a mistake she sees constantly: founders and NGO leaders who lock themselves into a single thematic identity and, by extension, a single fundraising lane. “Many people box their business or NGO into one thematic area, forgetting that it’s actually wide depending on the different services you render.”
Her challenge to the dance-focused founder was to think in product lines. The same organization could simultaneously pursue funding as a women’s empowerment initiative, a youth development program, an education technology platform, or even a creative economy enterprise depending on which aspect of its work it chooses to foreground. Each of those angles opens a distinct set of grants, accelerators, philanthropic organizations, and corporate partners.
“Think of five years, ten years’ time, what are the different product lines? Forget that you’re an NGO. Think of it as a product. What product line can I do that would bring in money and expand the impact I am passionate about?”
The goal isn’t to misrepresent what you do. It’s to recognize the full scope of what you’re building and pursue the full range of support available to it. When you do, Bello promises, your fundraising pathways multiply.
PART 4: Systems that attract funding
Every founder wants to talk about vision. Investors want to see your receipts.
In the final segment of Nolton Africa’s webinar, Samirah Bello brought the conversation back to earth with what she called one of the most consequential and most ignored aspects of building a fund-able organization: documentation. Not the pitch deck. Not the vision statement. The records.
Documentation Is Not Optional
Bello is direct about this. While she touched on documentation in earlier parts of the conversation, here she gave it the full weight it deserves. “Documentation is important,”
She said, and she means it in the broadest sense: financial records, organizational policies, impact data, photographs, testimonials, social media presence, a professional website, and verified accounts. All of it.
More specifically, she draws a line that too many early-stage founders blur: personal and business finances must never mix. Open a dedicated business account. Use an official email address. Keep a clean record of every transaction in and out. “Don’t mix personal with business” is less a best practice here than a hard rule — one that, if broken, will come back to haunt you when it matters most
The practical tools don’t need to be expensive. A friend studying accounting can set up a simple QuickBooks model. A law student can help with basic documentation and policies. Bello is unapologetic about this resourcefulness: “Bribe them with shawarma if you need to.”
The point is to start immediately and never stop.
Your Clock Starts When You Register
One of the most practically important things Bello shared is something many founders simply don’t know: funders count your organizational age from the date of registration, not the date of your idea.
Most substantial grants, she cites the range of $30,000 to $100,000, require an organization to have been in existence for at least two to three years. That clock does not start when you had the idea, or when you started testing, or when you made your first sale. It starts the day you formally register.
“Your three years start counting from the day you registered the organization, not the idea,” she said. “I can be a business for 10 years, but in the financial space, it is when you register your business that it starts counting.”
The implication is clear: register early. Do it as soon as your concept is formed, before you begin any financial transactions, and make sure everything passes through that registered entity from day one. Every year you delay is a year subtracted from your eligibility for serious funding.
Build Yourself Alongside Your Business
The final piece of Bello’s framework is perhaps the most overlooked by founders who are heads-down in their organizations: you are also an asset that needs to be built.
“You are the business,” she said, “but your portfolio is also important.” This means that while you are seeking funding opportunities for your organization, you should simultaneously be pursuing fellowships, training, and programs designed for individual founders. These aren’t distractions from the work; they are part of it.
The networks you build inside a fellowship, the credibility that comes from being an alumni of a recognized program, the skills you develop along the way all of these feed directly back into your fundability.
The mental shift Bello is asking for is to treat yourself and your organization as two distinct but interconnected businesses, both of which require deliberate investment and growth.
Final Conclusion
You Can raise your first $20,000 Dollars as a Social Enterprise, but your System Is the Strategy.
What ties all of this together is a simple but demanding principle: build the systems before you need them. Applications move fast. Calls for funding open and close within weeks. When that moment comes, you will not have time to reconstruct two years of financial history or draft policies from scratch. Either you have the records, or you don’t.
Founders who do the quiet, unglamorous work of documentation, who register early, keep clean books, build their personal profiles, and maintain consistent records through every stage are the ones who are ready when opportunity arrives. In fundraising, investment readiness is everything.
