Africa’s most overlooked growth engine is female — and online

A new report finds that Africa’s journey to economic gender parity has been delayed by half a century. Yet across kitchens, living rooms and smartphones from Lagos to Nairobi, women are building digital businesses that may become one of the continent’s most powerful engines of inclusive growth.

Late at night in Lagos, after her children have gone to sleep and the house has grown quiet, Amaka opens her phone.

During the day, she is a mother, accountant, school-run driver and caretaker of a household whose needs seem endless. But between 10 p.m. and midnight, she becomes something else: merchant, marketer, procurement officer and chief executive of a small online business selling skincare products to customers she may never meet.

Orders arrive through Instagram and WhatsApp. Payments land in her account. Deliveries are dispatched the next morning through motorcycle couriers threading through the city’s traffic.

From the outside, it looks like a side hustle. In economic terms, it is something far more significant.

It is one of the most important and least appreciated development stories unfolding in Africa today.

According to a major new report by Boston Consulting Group, Africa’s progress toward economic gender parity has moved sharply backward. Women’s economic participation in 2025 fell 0.6 percentage points below 2022 levels, extending the continent’s projected path to parity from 120 years to approximately 170 years — effectively adding another 50 years, or nearly two generations.

The numbers tell a sobering story. Between 2021 and 2024, Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita grew at just 1.2 per cent annually, less than half the global average of 2.5 per cent. Around 70 per cent of women remain concentrated in vulnerable and largely informal work, making them especially exposed during economic slowdowns.

And yet, amid this regression, a powerful countertrend is taking shape. Women are turning to digital entrepreneurship not merely to supplement household income, but to reclaim economic agency.

3,000 women and men surveyed across Africa’s  biggest economies

BCG surveyed nearly 3,000 women and men across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, Morocco and Egypt. The findings reveal extraordinary entrepreneurial ambition: 66 per cent of women aspire to run their own businesses, and in Nigeria and Kenya that figure exceeds 80 per cent. One in five women already operates an online business, while two-thirds are considering starting one.

These are not abstract aspirations. They are businesses rooted in daily necessity and deep local knowledge — selling food, fashion, healthcare, educational services and agricultural products.

In Go Local terms, they are micro-enterprises that process local demand into local wealth.

Digital platforms lower barriers

Digital platforms have lowered barriers that once excluded millions of women from formal economic participation.

A smartphone can substitute for a storefront. Social media can replace expensive advertising. Mobile payments reduce the need for physical cash handling. Home-based work offers flexibility and, critically, greater personal safety.

Platforms such as Jumia and Facebook Marketplace report that women account for roughly 40 to 50 percent of sellers in several African markets. In Uganda, mobile loans have increased women entrepreneurs’ profits by 15 percent and assets by 11 percent within eight months.

This is economic infrastructure in its most portable form. The factory fits in a pocket.

Financial system yet to catchup 

And yet the financial system continues to overlook one of the continent’s most productive entrepreneurial cohorts.

Women-led startups in Africa received less than 1 per cent of venture capital funding in 2024, despite generating twice as much revenue per dollar invested and achieving 10 percent higher long-term growth than male-led counterparts. The cumulative funding gap over the past five years amounts to roughly $2.5 billion.

Few statistics capture Africa’s capital-allocation inefficiency more starkly.

The issue is not performance. The issue is perception.

As BCG notes, many investors still view women-led businesses as too small, too early or too risky, even when evidence suggests the opposite. This misallocation carries significant macroeconomic consequences.

Women entrepreneurs are especially active in sectors tightly linked to local welfare — health, education, retail, agriculture and financial services. These businesses address real market failures while creating employment and broadening access to essential goods and services.

Research consistently shows that women reinvest a larger share of income into their families and communities, magnifying developmental impact.

In other words, capital directed toward women-led enterprises tends to generate both commercial returns and stronger social multipliers.

Institutions are beginning to respond

The African Development Bank recently approved a $61 million financing package for the Development Bank of Nigeria to expand credit for women-owned and women-led businesses, particularly in agriculture.

International Finance Corporation and ASR Africa have expanded the She Wins Africa programme from 100 to 1,000 women entrepreneurs across sub-Saharan Africa.

Meanwhile, Ecobank Group increased lending to women-led businesses by 194 per cent in 2025, disbursing $780 million.

These initiatives signal a growing recognition that financing women is not philanthropy. It is sound economic strategy.

Barriers remain

Still, barriers remain. BCG reports that 45 per cent of women surveyed lack regular internet access, largely because of affordability constraints.

This means that closing the gender gap requires more than capital alone. It also demands cheaper connectivity, digital skills, stronger logistics and financing instruments better suited to early-stage businesses — such as $50,000 to $100,000 ticket sizes, revenue-based financing and blended capital structures.

The central insight is simple: when institutions design systems around how women actually build businesses, growth accelerates.

Back in Lagos, Amaka closes her phone shortly after midnight. A few orders have come in. Nothing dramatic. But by month’s end, the business will help pay school fees, support suppliers and sustain household consumption.

To an economist, this is more than entrepreneurship. It is capital formation at the household level. Replicated millions of times across Africa, such enterprises represent one of the continent’s most underfinanced and highest-potential growth engines.

The world often looks to Africa’s minerals, farmland and demographics for signs of future prosperity. It may be overlooking something closer to home. A woman, a smartphone and a business built after the children are asleep.

That quiet act of enterprise may do more to transform Africa’s economy than many of the grand strategies debated in conference rooms.