Nigerian entrepreneur and talent manager Ubi Franklin has outlined an investment model he says could generate billions of naira by providing working capital to small food vendors operating in busy, densely populated areas across the country.
Franklin said the large number of Nigerians operating outside the formal banking system represents a major business opportunity for investors willing to provide them with daily working capital, arguing the segment remains largely untapped by the private sector.
“You see the unbanked; the money in the unbanked is a lot,” Franklin said, describing the target market for the proposed investment approach and the rationale for focusing on informal traders rather than registered businesses.
He said investors could direct their attention to small food vendors known locally as Mama Puts, particularly those who operate around motor parks and other high-traffic locations where daily customer volumes remain consistently high.
“So anybody watching this video, if you are living on the mainland or in a populated area where all these Mama Puts come to give food at the motor parks, you can be a billionaire just investing in 500 of them,” he stated.
Franklin explained the basic structure of the model: an investor provides each vendor with 50,000 naira as daily working capital, allowing the vendor to purchase ingredients, cook food, and sell to customers at the motor park or surrounding area before close of business.
At the end of each trading day, the vendor returns an agreed portion of the proceeds to the investor, who then deducts his 50,000 naira share and returns the same amount to the vendor as capital to repeat the cycle the following day.
“Give them 50k and every day come back. Do you know how much they make every day?” Franklin said, pointing to what he described as the high daily revenue potential of food vendors operating in densely populated Nigerian locations.
He acknowledged that figures vary across vendors but said some operators generate substantial daily returns, citing the cost of ingredients relative to the final sale price as the key driver of the model’s profitability for both the investor and the vendor.
“Let’s say they use 30k to cook food. Those guys make almost 250%. I know the conversion is always crazy,” he said, illustrating the potential margin between food production costs and total revenue generated from a single day of trading.
Franklin illustrated the return structure using a hypothetical example in which a vendor receives 50,000 naira, sells food, and returns either 150,000 naira or 200,000 naira to the investor at the end of the day, depending on how trading performs.
“So just imagine that you give them 50k to cook every day and then they come back with 200k. Or maybe they come back with 150k. Just an example,” he said, presenting the scenario as a guide to how the daily cash flow between investor and vendor would operate in practice.
He explained that the investor collects 50,000 naira from the proceeds each day as a return, then hands the same 50,000 naira back to the vendor as the next day’s capital, creating a self-sustaining daily loop that requires no additional outlay from the investor after the initial injection.
“And you take 50k, give them 50k, and they use the other 50k to go and continue cooking. And every day you are taking 50k from them,” he disclosed, adding that the daily 50,000 naira return from a single vendor amounts to 18.25 million naira per year when compounded over 365 days.
“Calculate 50k daily times 365 days. That’s mad money. 18 to 50. That’s on one person, on just one person,” Franklin said, before extending the projection to show that backing 100 vendors under the same model could theoretically return 1.8 billion naira annually.
Franklin’s projections are hypothetical. Actual returns depend on daily sales volumes, food production costs, vendor location, business performance, and the specific terms agreed between each investor and vendor before capital changes hands.
