In 2024, a consignment of Nigerian handbags left for Kenya as part of the country’s first shipment under the African Continental Free Trade Area. The bags belonged to Le Look, and the woman behind them, Chinwe Ezenwa, had spent 39 years making bags in Nigeria at a time, she says, when people disliked anything made in Africa, and especially anything made in Nigeria. The shipment was a milestone for the country’s trade ambitions. For Ezenwa, it was the moment a long argument finally had paperwork behind it.
She comes to business with an unusual background. Chief Chinwe Ezenwa is a retired public servant who worked in the Federal Ministry of Transportation and served as Acting Managing Director of the National Inland Waterways Authority, one of Nigeria’s maritime agencies. She is also the founder of Le Look Nigeria Limited, which she established in 1985 as a small women-led business making bags. Colleagues in the maritime industry describe a woman who did not slow down after leaving government service, and she went on to open a bag-making academy for girls in Abuja.
What Le Look makes is distinctly Nigerian. Its bags are crafted from locally woven and dyed fabrics, including Adire, Akwete and Aso oke. When officials from the AfCFTA office visited the factory, they found that the fabrics came from Nigeria, with only about 20 percent of the materials, such as zips, imported. That mattered, because, as Ezenwa describes the rules, goods must prove that 80 percent of their raw materials come from the country claiming them. She welcomes the requirement, because it keeps the market for African producers. “It will be Africa versus Africa,” she says.
The proof came in 2024, when Le Look became the first company to receive a Nigeria-AfCFTA Certificate of Origin and took part in the first shipment of Nigerian goods under the guided trade initiative, exporting bags to Kenya. Le Look is now recognised by the AfCFTA office and has partners in Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia. It has since been reported as the first small and medium enterprise to receive the Authorised Economic Operator certificate from the Nigeria Customs Service, a status designed to speed goods through ports.
She is realistic about the obstacles. Ezenwa has described holding a certificate under the ECOWAS trade liberalisation scheme and still seeing a shipment to Ghana held up for months over competition concerns, and she argues that the sanctions built into AfCFTA make this kind of delay harder to repeat. In her experience, markets in Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Ghana are easier to enter than those in Europe and America. Her advice to fellow Nigerian business owners is simple: be consistent, resilient and innovative, without waiting for government.
The business is only half of her work. Le Look Bags Academy trains people in bag making and runs in Abuja, Enugu and Lagos. With support from the United Nations Development Programme, it has run a three-month course in AfCFTA-compliant bag making for export readiness, aimed at unemployed young people with limited formal education, most of them women. Its graduates have included people with disabilities, and both men and women are welcome. Together with the Nigerian Export Promotion Council and the Customs Service, Le Look has also launched an export skills centre and a fashion innovation hub.
On 1 October 2025, Le Look marked its 40th anniversary at the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos, under the theme “Legacy of Resilience: Empowering Entrepreneurs for Africa’s Economic Future.” The head of the Nigerian Export Promotion Council, Nonye Ayeni, called Ezenwa a national treasure whose four decades in manufacturing have boosted Nigeria’s non-oil export drive. The company’s longest-serving staff member, Martin Iheguagu, called the anniversary a milestone and pointed to the academy’s effect on young people. Ezenwa described the four decades as a battle fought and won, and the event as a celebration of “resilience, creativity, and the power of Nigerian enterprise.”
She is clear about what the recognition asks of her. She says she was overwhelmed to be named a trailblazer by the Nigeria AfCFTA Coordination Office, and that it comes with responsibilities: her commitment is to train and empower people through export trade so they can become earners and self-reliant. She also has a wider hope for Nigerian goods at home. If every person on the street carried a Le Look bag, she has said, the brand would not need patronage from outside the country.
What Chinwe Ezenwa’s story offers is a lesson in staying power. For four decades she made something in Nigeria, from Nigerian fabrics, before it became fashionable to say so, and she kept building through years when few were buying the argument. Her bags are now crossing African borders under a certificate that did not exist when she started. The title of this feature says her bags are made in Nigeria and sold across Africa. The more lasting achievement may be what she built beside them, a school that teaches others to do the same.
