In this interview, a former Special Advisor to the President of the African Development Bank, Prof. Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, speaks with GRACE EDEMA on the newly unveiled TransComs initiative, a model designed to drive rural industrialisation by transforming semi-urban and rural communities into integrated economic hubs across Southwest Nigeria
What opportunities will TransComs open up for young people and SMEs in the region?
This is, for me, the heart of the programme. Every infrastructure decision we make is ultimately in service of this question. For young people, TransComs creates three distinct opportunity pathways. The first is skills and employment within the hubs themselves through processing operations, quality control, logistics coordination, digital services, hub management. These are not low-wage, informal jobs; they are structured roles within a formalised economic unit. The second pathway is enterprise: the cooperative and SME development infrastructure within each hub is designed to help young entrepreneurs formalise, scale, and access markets they currently cannot reach. The third is the digital economy layer through opportunities in agritech, e-commerce, data services, and platform businesses that the hub’s connectivity infrastructure makes possible. For SMEs, the primary value is aggregated sourcing, market access and standards compliance. A significant portion of Southwest Nigeria’s small agro-processors, artisanal producers gather insufficient stock feed, and service enterprises are locked out of formal and export markets not because their products lack quality, but because they lack the certification, packaging standards, and logistics infrastructure to meet buyer requirements. TransComs resolves that bottleneck collectively as the hub invests in shared infrastructure that would be prohibitive for any single SME to replicate. There is also a financial dimension. The programme’s cooperative structures and our engagement with fintech and microfinance partners are designed to expand access to working capital and business development services for enterprises that are currently underserved by formal financial institutions. The ambition is not just a hub, but a self-reinforcing local economy.
