Africa has the highest rates of female entrepreneurship worldwide and a burgeoning start-up scene, yet women in business often face great difficulty accessing the type of finance suitable to their stage of business.
While Venture Capital (VC) in Africa grew from $277 million in 2015 to $4.7 billion in 2023, less than 2 percent went to female-founded startups[1], in line with global averages.
The other end of the equity scale looks more promising for female founders. The volume of angel investment deals growing 3-fold between 2020 to 2023 and women represent 38 percent of angel investors, reaching 50 percent in the 40-49 age cohort. This is promising, as we know that women investors are more likely to invest in female-founded ventures.
While tech–and fintech in particular–has received the lion’s share of equity investment on the continent so far, certain sectors such as e-commerce and health-tech have higher percentages of female founders. Taking sub-sector into account is important when identifying pipelines of women-led fast growth SMEs and startups.
The pathways to enable more female-founded fast growth startups will be explored at the upcoming Summit in Kigali, when representatives from Village Capital and Endeavor Africa, among others, will share how they support women entrepreneurs at different stages of the startup lifecycle. Their programs include accelerators, bootcamps, expert mentorship, immersive development training, fundraising support, and networking opportunities.
For the more numerous women-led enterprises that are low-to-medium growth, discussions at the Summit will focus on approaches to improve access to debt finance and emerging models to provide cost effective non-financial services at scale, including the African Management Institute and the UK’s Digital Boost, a remarkable mentoring platform.
More details on the Summit speakers can be found here.
[1] https://techpoint.africa/insight/african-venture-capital-must-target-female-entrepreneurs/
