Access to funding remains a significant challenge for African female founders, with 55 percent identifying it as the biggest obstacle in their entrepreneurial journey.
This was revealed in Disrupt Africa’s report, ‘Diversity Dividend: Exploring Gender Equality in the African Tech Ecosystem.’
“Fundraising has been an uphill battle as a female tech founder,” said Evelyn Kaingu, a female entrepreneur. “It has been hard with most funders to be taken seriously and provide ‘validation’ to what we’re building.”
According to the report, the number of African tech startups led by female CEOs has grown, with 310 companies (11.1 percent) now under female leadership, up from 230 (9.6 percent) in 2023. Additionally, as of June 1, 2024, 483 of the 2,786 documented African tech startups (17.3 percent) had at least one female co-founder.
Chidalu Onyenso, Founder of Earthbound, noted that female founders often face scrutiny regarding their personal lives, which their male counterparts do not encounter.
“In fundraising and closing partnership deals, there’s often an insistence on understanding and evaluating a woman’s non-professional life as a proxy to how she prioritises business. Being honest and bringing my whole self into the workplace without letting my other identities be used against my ability to be high achieving as a founder has been a balancing act that I’m still figuring out,” she said.
Between January 1, 2022, and June 4, 2024, 1,005 African tech startups raised $6.24 billion in funding. Of these, 220 (21.9 percent) had at least one female co-founder, up from 21 percent in the previous year. Moreover, 119 startups (11.8 percent) were led by female CEOs, a slight increase from 11.7 percent in 2023.
Ruth Olojede, Co-founder of Click, stated, “There have been instances where potential clients, business partnerships or investments were nearly jeopardised due to gender prejudice.”
The report highlighted that 220 African tech startups with at least one female co-founder have secured $747 million in funding since January 2022, representing 11.9 percent of the total, up from 9.1 percent in 2023. 119 startups led by female CEOs raised $289 million, accounting for 4.6 percent of the total, an increase from 2.9 percent in 2023.
Disrupt Africa pointed out that its findings can only be characterised as “baby steps” for diversity in the region, given the significant disadvantage women still face within the tech startup ecosystem.
ConnectAfrica, a not-for-profit, Africa-focused business networking community, stated, “While it is clear from the data that African tech remains very much a male-dominated landscape, there are positives to be drawn from the growth in female leadership we have seen over the last year, however small. Much serious work still needs to be done to get women anywhere near parity from a leadership perspective within the space.”
Ingressive Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm, added, “One of the ways to navigate this is to have more female investors both as VCs, policymakers, and even angels who can help develop more inclusive and less-biased processes for fundraising, ensuring that founders are not marginalised based on gender.”
