Nigeria’s Igbo apprenticeship system built a generation of entrepreneurs, but left women behind

Illustration Description: A woman wearing an orange patterned blouse sits behind a table stacked with folded clothes, suggesting she is a clothing trader. Behind her, several young male apprentices are working, talking, and carrying bundles of clothing.

Lagos, Nigeria (Minority Africa) — Linda still remembers the sting of being dismissed in her own shop. A customer had walked in, browsed through clothes, and when it came time to ask for a price, he turned away from her and addressed one of her apprentices instead. 

“Where is the owner?” he asked. 

“I just laughed and told him, ‘The owner is standing right in front of you,’” Linda recalls.

For Linda, who has been selling clothes for the past seven years, moments like these are common, a reminder that in her line of work, many people still struggle to believe a woman could be in charge. 

Her shop sits inside a world built long before she arrived:  the Igbo apprenticeship system.

The Igbo apprenticeship system has long been celebrated as one of Africa’s most effective models of wealth creation and redistribution, a structure that takes young men with little more than ambition and turns them into entrepreneurs. Its success stories have travelled far, often framed as proof of the Igbo people’s determination and ingenuity. 

Starting after the Nigerian civil war ended in 1970, many Igbo families returned to cities across Nigeria to find their homes, businesses and savings wiped out. The federal government offered returning Igbo citizens a flat compensation of £20, regardless of what they had lost. For many, Igbo families, the compensation was barely enough to survive or start again.

“The government gave returning Igbo people about twenty pounds,” says Oreoluwa Familoni, a researcher who studied the apprenticeship model. “But it was nothing compared to the scale of loss.”

Communities had little choice but to rebuild themselves.

“The apprenticeship system wasn’t designed as a formal economic model,” Familoni explains. “It emerged as a survival strategy. People had lost their property, business and sometimes their entire livelihoods. So communities began bringing younger boys from the villages into cities like Lagos and Enugu to learn trade.”

Instead of wages, apprentices were offered something far more valuable: accommodation, mentorship and eventually capital to start businesses of their own. Over time, masters who had once been apprentices themselves would take on new boys, creating a cycle that allowed wealth to circulate within the community.

For Linda, stepping into this world was never part of the plan. Growing up in Bariga, a crowded suburb of Lagos where her mother sold fruit to keep the family afloat, Linda dreamed of becoming a doctor. That hope ended when her secondary school placed her in the commercial class instead of science. Later, she studied political science at the University of Lagos. 

“When I was told I couldn’t do science, it felt like someone cut off my dream,” she recalls. “I wanted to save lives. But after that, I just followed the path that was left.”  

Trade, however, was never far from her. Her elder sister was already navigating the international markets of Dubai, China, and Turkey, importing clothes to sell back home. Linda worked with her in the shop during her late teens, learning the rhythms of retail. She remembers the first time she helped a customer who bought clothes in bulk. 

“I saw the money exchange hands and thought, so this is how people build themselves,” she says. “I didn’t know it then, but it planted something in me.”

Years later, marriage pulled her back into trade through her husband’s thriving clothing business. At first, she says, she was only helping. “He would travel and I would stay in the shop. Customers didn’t take me seriously in the beginning, but I told myself, ‘I have to learn this thing.’” 

Eventually, Linda began running her own business, carving out a place for herself in a system that historically had little room for women. Like many traders before her, Linda turned to the Igbo apprenticeship model, known as Igba-Boi or Nwa Boy, not only as a practical solution but as a way of giving back.

“Sales girls can leave without notice,” she explains. “But an apprentice will stay, learn, and one day be independent.” 

Her first apprentice came in 2012, introduced by a relative. 

“People asked me, ‘Are you sure he will respect you?’” she says. “But I told them, if you treat someone well, they will respect you and if they don’t, they will still learn what they came for.”

The system itself thrives on relationships like this. Reliable national statistics are difficult to obtain, but research suggests that roughly 60 to 65 per cent of trade-based businesses in southeastern Nigeria and major commercial hubs like Lagos trace their origin to the Igbo apprenticeship model.

“Many traders train apprentices throughout their lifetime,” Familoni says. “Some may train two or three, while others raise ten or even fifteen over the course of their careers.”

The system has helped produce thousands of business owners across Nigeria’s informal economy. Yet for all its success, it remains overwhelmingly male. Despite the strong presence of Igbo women in trade, few are trained through the formal apprenticeship system. Part of the reason lies in culture.

“The Igbo culture, like many African cultures, is strongly patriarchal,” Familoni explains. “Commerce was traditionally seen as the domain of men, while women are expected to focus more on building and sustaining the home.”

The structure of the apprenticeship itself also played a role. Apprentices typically live with their masters for five to seven years – a period that coincides with the age when many young women might marry or begin families.

“There were concerns that taking young women away from their families for such long periods could disrupt those life transitions,” Familoni says. There are also fears about safety. In interviews conducted during his research, Familoni found that some traders worried that young women placed in male-dominated environments could be vulnerable to verbal harassment or sexual exploitation.

“In some of the conversations we had, people raised concerns about the possibility of abuse,” he says. “That was one of the reasons some traders felt uncomfortable placing young women in those spaces.” 

Instead, many women enter trade through informal arrangements, learning under female shop owners for shorter periods rather than through the structured apprenticeship system.

Linda has been able to carve out her own place within the system. Her method is strict but deliberate. Before accepting an apprentice fully, she imposes a six-month to one-year testing phase, watching closely for humility, discipline, and character.

“It’s not just about selling,” she says. “It’s about staying, learning, and respecting the process.”

Apprentices live with her, eat her food, share her space, and learn far more than business. 

“If you train someone like your own child, they leave with skills and morals,” she says. “That’s how I was trained, and that’s what I give back.”

Her approach reflects what makes the Igbo apprenticeship system unique. In Lagos, where the informal economy dominates, the model has become one of the city’s most powerful engines of upward mobility. For many young people from modest backgrounds, the system remains one of the most accessible paths to entrepreneurship. Still, women are rarely included.

Few traders are willing to take the risk of training them, citing the likelihood of marriage or family responsibilities pulling them away. 

“People say if you train a girl, once she marries, all the years are wasted,” Linda says. “Even me, I know it would be harder for a woman to stand alone. The system was built by men, for men. But that doesn’t mean women cannot survive in it.”

The challenges extend beyond gender. Business itself is fragile, caught in a constant struggle against fluctuating exchange rates, customs regulations, and unpredictable delays that can stall shipments for weeks. For traders like Linda, a single stuck container can disrupt months of planning. Yet she meets those obstacles with pragmatism.

“Any method they bring, we find a way around it,” she says, describing how traders adapt daily to survive shifting policies. 

But survival is not guaranteed. She recalls one apprentice who showed immense promise. He worked hard, gained her trust, and even acquired land to build his own future. Yet reckless decisions eventually erased everything he had built.

“All the years he spent with me weren’t useful to him in the end,” she says. 

The disappointment lingers, but it has not shaken her belief in the system. Others she has trained have gone on to open their own shops, hire their own apprentices, and continue the cycle that helped rebuild Igbo commerce decades ago.

Inside her shop, apprentices move between racks of clothes, calling out prices to customers and carrying new stock in from the street. Linda watches them with the quiet attentiveness of someone who understands exactly what this system can do for a life. 

Decades after the war that forced Igbo communities to rebuild from almost nothing, the apprenticeship system still moves forward in markets and shops like hers, passing opportunity from one generation to the next. But despite not being designed with women in mind, Linda continues  to find her way it anyway.

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Edited/Reviewed by Samuel Banjoko, Caleb Okereke, and Uzoma Ihejirika.

Illustrated by: Rex Opara