Funding to female founders falls four-fold in 2024

Female founders in Africa received only two percent of funding in 2024, according to Africa: The Big Deal.

The data insight firm that tracks funding raises of $100,000 and above revealed that female chief executive officers on the continent attracted only $48m in funding in 2024, a four-fold decline from 2023 and an all-time low for female founders since 2019. On the flip side, almost $2.2 billion went to their male counterparts in the same period.

It further noted that only $123 million went to gender-diverse founding teams and $21 million to solo female founders or all-female founding teams. Comparatively, solo male founders raised $430 million, and all-male founding teams reached $1.6 billion.

A percentage breakdown revealed that only 1 percent of the total funding went to solo female founders or all-female founding teams, 5.5 percent for gender-diverse founding teams, and 95.5 percent for solo male founders or all-male founding teams.

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Access to funding has always been a challenge for female founders, with 55 percent of the 483 of them citing it as the biggest obstacle in their entrepreneurial journey, according to a Disrupt Africa report.

Chidalu Onyenso, Founder of Earthbound, noted that female founders often face scrutiny regarding their personal lives in their quest for funding, 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,” she said.

Ingressive Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm, noted, “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.”