LocationsFrom Personal Experience to Purpose-Driven Innovation: The Story of Trade Lenda
April 30, 2025
Adeshina’s enterpreneurial journey began at an early age of 7 inspired by his mother.
Adeshina’s enterpreneurial journey began at an early age of 7 inspired by his mother. His mother was a wholesaler who rose the ranks with Fan Milk, becoming one of the top 5 distributors across the South South and South East region of Nigeria. In the middle of 2003, Adeshina’s dad lost his job and this seamily small business became the major source of income for the family. Yet, like many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), she struggled to access the financing needed to grow. That experience lit a spark in Adeshina to tackle the financing gap faced by small businesses.
In 2019, Adeshina started out first to create an online store front for small business owners. This was during pre-covid when there was little focus on online channels/digital commerce across Africa. By 2020, Adeshina discovered an even wider gap which was the inability for small and medium business owners to leverage to scale outside of their savings echoing his mother’s challenge decades earlier.
Trade Lenda and The Transformation – Journey Through the Accelerator
As Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem accelerates, driven by a cashless economy and global innovation, Trade Lenda emerged to provide accessible financial solutions for SMEs. Before joining the timbuktoo Fintech Accelerator, liquidity was a major challenge. Through the programme, Trade Lenda established key credit lines and built partnerships across Africa, positioning itself as a go-to platform for inclusive SME financing.
The timbuktoo Fintech Accelerator Programme has given Trade Lenda an opportunity to engage with potential partners across the various African countries that were represented during the program. From the Fintech Accelerator Programme, we were able to develop partnerships that position our solution as the go to for impact investment and inclusive financing for SMEs across emerging markets in the near future.
The Impact – Making a Difference
In line with their Vision (Vision: Develop financial solutions for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) capable of delivering the next 1 million jobs across Africa and Emerging markets by 2027) to track the impact of solutions and the environment and people. So far, they have already tracked over 10,000 new jobs from various engagements of their work. They are also developing financial solutions for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) capable of delivering additional jobs across Africa and emerging markets.
Additionally, Trade Lenda is looking at impact focused foundations to make a significant impact on the continent and across emerging markets. Our focus with these partnerships is to support more women with cost effective and inclusive financing.
The Future – Scaling Beyond the Accelerator
Trade Lenda is already making plans on their path to securing a Finance House license to enable them to grow their liquidity base locally and without so much rudimentary restrictions to help SMEs get custom inclusive access to finance when they need it. Trade Lenda hopes that in 5 years’ time their solution will We believe create up to 1 million jobs across every market they operate. Their goal would be to support SMEs and underserved segment market with inclusive financing across Africa and other emerging market.