Representing the interest of the government at this year’s event is none other than Mr Charles Anyanwu, the Acting Director at Lagos State Employment Trust Fund. He is also the founder, and CEO of Timothy Freeman and Associates, in Lagos.
As a certified Project Manager, he has an extensive range experience in Business Development, Entrepreneurial analysis, Development and Implementation of Youth-centric Corporate Social Responsibility projects, across Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa.
He is passionate about discussing corporate training solutions, job creation and capacity development interventions for youth, impact sourcing, Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET), developing and managing sustainable youth-focused corporate social responsibility projects, setting up monitoring and evaluation frameworks and systems.
An alumnus of University of Ibadan, Oyo State, he spent the first four years after graduation gaining volunteer experience in Strategy from Guardians of the Nation International (GONTI), while working at Marble Fixtures as Business Development Executive, and at Global Training Consulting, as an assistant consultant in Business development.
Then, he went on to work with AGDC Employability and Enterprise Devt. Ltd/GTE, a non-profit organisation, and was in-charge of Team Leads Project. This job afforded him the opportunity of working with both international non-profit agencies, as well as, local public and private organisations, where he helped develop employability and entrepreneurship programmes and interventions. Such as the Lagos Ignite Employability and Enterprise project and the Corona iTeach Project. This job also afforded him the opportunity to represent the organisation at the International Youth Foundation’s Youth Employability conference in Cape Town.
He was an Entrepreneurial Analyst for the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) for roughly four years where he served as a Project Manager, vetting and managing a pool of over 127 African SMEs from those who participated in the program, and also served as a TEF representative at a partnership agreement with AllWorld Inc. He later joined the Arc Skills, a company dedicated to Professional training and coaching, and also, the Winners of the 2017 Qadat Al Tagheer Award for Skills Development Globally. After two years of working at Arc Skills, he went on to found his own company, Timothy Freeman and Associates.
Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF)snatched him up in 2016, to continue developing and updating the SME strategies for the state. Since then, he has been designing and delivering ranges of products, programs and schemes for the SME target beneficiaries & ensuring the effectiveness of products, programs and systems. Charles Anyanwu has helped SMEs with articulating the pricing conditions and terms of delivery for the on-lending partners to provide alignment with LSETF developmental goal as well as the partners. He assists SMEs with identifying the non-financial interventions and business advisory/capacity development required for SMEs, operationalisation of the SMEs partnership framework and management of SMEs relationships with on-lending & business development partners to ensure efficient delivery of SME interventions.
From time to time, he conducts an on-going review of SME needs and refines products/programs to address them to drive uptake across the geographical areas. As well as, monitor and track the SMEs performance against set targets and address essential gaps. He, also, champions research on crucial SME issues to pinpoint the critical implications for LSETF.
If you are about to start up an SME, I would recommend you attend the Connect Nigeria Business Fair Event this weekend so you can learn the ropes from our guest speaker.
For more enquiries about how to Register, Sponsor or Exhibit, kindly log on to www.connectnigeria.com/bizfair or call 0700 800 5000.
