10 Nigerian Women Building Extraordinary Businesses

Nigeria’s business landscape is full of women building companies in places where the obstacles are often as large as the opportunities.

They are processing cassava into industrial ingredients, financing women-owned businesses, building food brands, modernising agriculture, creating technology platforms and turning local consumer demand into companies with ambitions far beyond their original markets.

Some started with very little.

Others entered industries where women were historically underrepresented.

What connects them is not a particular business model or industry. It is the willingness to build something substantial and keep building it as the market changes.

From Oyo’s agricultural heartland to Lagos’s technology and consumer economy, these are 10 Nigerian women building businesses worth paying attention to.

This is an editorial selection, not a ranking.

1. Folorunso Alakija, Building Across Industries

Folorunso Alakija’s business career is unusual even by the standards of Nigerian entrepreneurship.

She began in banking before moving into fashion, where she founded Supreme Stitches, later renamed Rose of Sharon House of Fashion. She subsequently became a major figure in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry through FAMFA Oil and has also built interests in printing and real estate.

Today, she serves as vice chairman of FAMFA Oil and has interests across several businesses, including Digitalreality Print and Dayspring Property Development. Her official biography describes the Rose of Sharon Towers and Centre Point among Dayspring’s developments.

Her entrepreneurial story is particularly notable because it crosses sectors that require completely different forms of expertise.

Fashion.

Energy.

Real estate.

Printing.

Rather than building one company around one industry, Alakija has spent decades building across several parts of the Nigerian economy.

That makes her story less about a single business and more about the possibilities of long-term enterprise building.

2. Tara Fela-Durotoye, Turning Beauty Into an Institution

Tara Fela-Durotoye is one of the pioneers of Nigeria’s modern beauty industry.

She founded House of Tara and spent 27 years building the company into one of Nigeria’s best-known indigenous beauty businesses. She also established a makeup academy and a national retail network for makeup products and services.

But perhaps the more interesting part of her story is what happened after the company had been built.

In 2025, Fela-Durotoye handed day-to-day leadership of House of Tara to Rosemary Layode. In 2026, she spoke publicly about succession and institution-building through her Building Beyond You initiative.

That transition represents a different measure of entrepreneurial success.

The company is no longer simply an extension of its founder.

It has become an institution capable of continuing beyond her direct involvement.

In a Nigerian business environment where founder dependence can be a major challenge, that is an important lesson.

3. Oluyemisi Iranloye, Turning Cassava Into Industry

In rural Oyo State, Oluyemisi Iranloye built a business around something Nigeria produces in enormous quantities: cassava.

She is the founder and CEO of Psaltry International, an agro-allied company producing cassava starch, flour, glucose, hydrogen and what the company describes as Africa’s first cassava-based sorbitol.

The business serves multinational companies including Unilever and Nestlé and has built relationships with large numbers of smallholder farmers. Psaltry says it has supported 16,000 smallholder farmers through training, inputs, funding and guaranteed markets, while its foundation describes the wider farming network around the company as involving more than 100,000 farm families.

The significance of Iranloye’s work goes beyond cassava.

Nigeria is one of the world’s major cassava producers, yet much of the crop has historically been sold in relatively low-value forms.

Psaltry’s model attempts to move more of that value into industrial processing.

A 2026 BusinessDay profile described how Iranloye’s factory in Ado-Awaye is turning cassava into industrial ingredients while connecting rural farmers to formal markets.

It is the kind of business that rarely gets the same attention as a technology startup.

But it sits directly inside the question of how Nigeria creates more value from what it already produces.

4. Ada Osakwe, Building a Modern African Food Brand

Ada Osakwe has built a career across investment, agriculture, public policy and entrepreneurship.

She is the founder of Nuli, a farm-to-table food and beverage brand, and founder and CEO of Agrolay Ventures, an investment firm focused on businesses with the potential to transform food and agricultural ecosystems. The World Bank describes her as an entrepreneur and investor with two decades of experience across private equity, development finance, policy and venture building.

Nuli is particularly interesting because it sits between agriculture and consumer business.

The brand uses locally grown produce and turns it into a modern food and beverage experience.

And it has already begun moving beyond Nigeria.

Osakwe has reported that Nuli opened its first international flagship in Washington, D.C., in August 2025.

That creates a compelling proposition: a Nigerian food brand built around African ingredients, but designed to compete in international consumer markets.

It is one way Nigerian agriculture can move up the value chain, not only exporting raw materials, but building brands around them.

5. Solape Akinpelu, Building Financial Products for Women

Solape Akinpelu co-founded HerVest to address a problem she believed traditional financial systems were not adequately solving: women’s access to savings, investment and credit.

HerVest provides financial services to African women, including savings, impact investing and credit financing for women farmers and women-led SMEs. The company says its membership has grown to more than 30,000, while a 2026 Sterling Bank profile placed its membership above 100,000, illustrating that publicly reported figures vary by source and date.

HerVest’s 2026 product development also shows how the company is moving beyond basic financial access. Akinpelu announced the HerVest Financial Inclusion Index and Dara AI, a robo-advisory product designed to help users make financial decisions and build wealth.

The bigger business idea is straightforward:

If women are excluded from or underserved by financial systems, build products specifically around their realities.

Akinpelu has turned that proposition into a fintech company while also becoming a prominent voice in conversations about gender finance and women’s economic participation.

6. Anu Adedoyin Adasolum, Building Infrastructure for Africa’s Informal Commerce

Anu Adedoyin Adasolum is the founder and CEO of Sabi, a technology platform focused on underserved merchants.

Sabi provides tools around commerce, fulfilment, logistics, ERP, financial services, data and business operations. TechCabal’s 2026 Moonshot profile describes the company as one of Africa’s fastest-growing business networks.

The problem Sabi is tackling is particularly Nigerian.

Millions of businesses operate outside large formal corporate structures. They buy, sell, move goods, collect payments and manage inventory, often without the systems available to larger companies.

Adasolum’s approach is to build those systems around them.

Her background includes roles at Dangote Industries, KPMG Nigeria, Rensource Energy and Jumia, giving her experience across operations, consulting, energy and commerce before founding Sabi.

The opportunity is much larger than Nigeria.

Informal and fragmented commerce exists across much of Africa, making the infrastructure Sabi is building relevant to other markets as well.

7. Oluwayimika Angel Adelaja, Farming Differently

Oluwayimika Angel Adelaja is building around a problem Nigeria knows very well: how to produce more food with limited urban land and resources.

She is the founder and CEO of Fresh Direct Nigeria, an urban farming and agricultural technology company based in Abuja. The World Economic Forum describes her work as bringing communities together through agricultural technologies and innovation while strengthening agricultural value chains.

Her company uses approaches including hydroponics and container farming, allowing crops to be produced in smaller spaces and with less dependence on conventional agricultural land.

The 2026 Naijapreneur women entrepreneurs feature describes Fresh Direct’s approach as using hydroponics and container farming to support year-round vegetable production.

That is particularly relevant as Nigerian cities grow.

Agriculture does not necessarily have to happen far outside the city.

Adelaja’s work explores what happens when technology, urbanisation and food production meet.

8. Kehinde Kamson, Building a Nigerian Food Institution

Kehinde Kamson started Sweet Sensation from a small space in Lagos.

More than three decades later, the business has become one of Nigeria’s established quick-service restaurant brands.

BusinessDay’s 2025 profile traced the company’s origins to a small shed and described Kamson’s decades-long journey of building the business while raising a family.

The company has grown into a substantial restaurant operation, with Sweet Sensation continuing to operate in Nigeria in 2026.

Kamson’s story is worth studying because restaurants are difficult businesses to scale.

They require consistent food quality, supply chains, locations, staff, customer service, operations and brand recognition.

Building one successful restaurant is one challenge.

Building a recognisable Nigerian restaurant brand over decades is another.

Kamson has done the latter.

9. Omolara Sanni, Simplifying Africa-China Trade

Omolara Sanni is building in a part of business that most consumers rarely see, but thousands of African businesses depend on: international sourcing.

She is a co-founder of Midddleman, a company focused on facilitating Africa-China trade through payments, sourcing, procurement and logistics.

In 2026, Sanni described the company’s evolution from a problem she and her co-founder experienced themselves as importers into a platform serving thousands of businesses and processing billions in transaction volume.

That is a significant opportunity in African commerce.

Businesses may know what they want to buy from China but struggle with supplier verification, payments, procurement, shipping and trust.

Midddleman’s proposition is to simplify that process.

The interesting part of Sanni’s story is that the business was not built around an abstract technology trend.

It began with a real commercial problem.

Then the technology was built around it.

10. Kehinde Omojuyigbe-Efevoghor, Building Local Food Manufacturing

Nigeria’s food economy is full of opportunities to replace imported products with locally made alternatives.

Kehinde Omojuyigbe-Efevoghor is among the entrepreneurs working in that space.

She is the founder of food manufacturing company Foodlovers and has been recognised among Nigerian women building businesses across the food-processing and manufacturing value chain. A 2026 BusinessDay feature highlighted her alongside other women transforming how food is grown, processed and sold in Nigeria.

Her inclusion in this list reflects an important part of Nigeria’s business story.

Manufacturing does not always arrive in the form of giant factories.

It can begin with a founder identifying a product Nigerians already consume and figuring out how to manufacture it locally, improve the supply chain and create a commercially sustainable brand.

That work matters because the future of Nigerian enterprise will depend partly on how much more value local companies can capture between raw materials and finished products.

More Than “Women in Business”

There is a tendency to talk about women entrepreneurs as though their businesses belong to a separate category.

They do not.

The women building companies across Nigeria are working in the same difficult economy as everyone else.

They are dealing with inflation, infrastructure constraints, financing challenges, changing consumer behaviour, regulation, supply-chain problems and competition.

And they are building across almost every part of the economy.

From cassava processing to fintech.

From restaurants to agricultural technology.

From beauty to international trade.

From commerce infrastructure to food manufacturing.

That diversity matters.

The Businesses Being Built Are Bigger Than the Founders

One of the strongest themes across these stories is the movement from individual entrepreneurship towards institution building.

Tara Fela-Durotoye has spoken openly about the importance of building a company that can survive its founder.

Oluyemisi Iranloye’s business connects industrial processing with rural farming communities.

Ada Osakwe is connecting agriculture, investment and consumer food brands.

Solape Akinpelu is building financial infrastructure around women.

Anu Adasolum is building systems for merchants.

These are not simply businesses designed to make sales.

They are attempts to build systems around problems.

And that distinction is important.

The Next Chapter of Nigerian Enterprise

Nigeria has no shortage of entrepreneurial energy.

The bigger challenge is turning that energy into companies that survive economic cycles, develop strong management, create jobs, build supply chains and eventually become institutions.

The women on this list are taking different routes to that goal.

Some are building factories.

Some are building technology.

Some are building consumer brands.

Some are creating financial products.

Some are modernising industries that have existed for generations.

Together, they offer a broader picture of Nigerian entrepreneurship, one that goes beyond the startup ecosystem and into the productive economy.

Because extraordinary businesses are not only built in boardrooms or funded by venture capital.

Sometimes they begin with cassava, vegetables, food, makeup, a restaurant, a financial problem or a difficult trade transaction.

The extraordinary part is what happens when someone decides to build a serious company around the opportunity.