👩🏾💻 2023 👩🏾💻 Just a little more funding for Women CEOs 👩🏾💻
Though it remained small, the absolute amount and share of funding going to female-led ventures did grow in Africa last year compared to 2022.
Previously on Africa: The Big Deal: Start-ups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding last year, while 85% of all funding went to solo male founders or all-male founding teams…
When we look at funding raised based on the gender of the founder(s), results are clearly not encouraging. Things only look slightly better if we focus on who is leading the start-up at the time the funding is announced - i.e. the CEO, who by the way, is almost always (one of) the founder(s). In 2023, female-led ventures in Africa raised just above $200m, showing positive YoY growth (+7%). Considering funding overall shrunk by -39% YoY, this is pretty commendable. During the same period, funding raised by male-led ventures went down -40%, though in absolute terms it is very far ahead at $2.7b, i.e. 13x times more.
What it means is that for every $1 raised by male-led start-ups in Africa in 2023, their female-led counterparts raised just 7.6¢. While small, this number is actually 1.8x times higher than it was in 2022 (4.2¢), so we can probably say this is encouraging. Overall in 2023, female-led ventures raised 7% of all the funding, up from 4% the previous year. However, it also means that male-led ventures claimed 93% of the money last year (down from 96% in 2022). In other words, by February 1st, 2023, male-led start-ups had already raised more funding than female-led ventures would raise throughout the whole year.
If we focus on the number of ventures hat raised funding in 2023 - as opposed to the amount of funding raised - women CEOs are more represented: 20% of the ventures raising $100k+ in Africa in 2023 were woman-led, up from 13% in 2022. Unfortunately, they become harder to find as the deals grow bigger: of the ventures that raised $1m+ last year, only 14% had a female CEO (vs. 12% in both 2021 and 2022). What it means in turn is that the $1m+ deals raised by female CEOs were on average smaller than those raised by male CEOs: $6.4m vs. $15m (i.e. 2.3x times less).
The representation of women-led start-ups continues to decrease if we look at even larger deals: only 7% of the ventures raising $10m+ in Africa in 2023 were woman-led (compared to 4% in 2022 and 6% in 2021). The $10m+ deals raised by female CEOs were also smaller on average than those raised by male CEOs: $23m vs. $40m (i.e. 1.8x times less). The largest deal raised by a woman CEO last year was Sabi’s $38m Series B (e-commerce, Nigeria). 10 male CEOs raised $38m or (much, much) more in 2023, worth a total of $1.4 billion.
Can you believe January’s almost over? It’s been a very busy month for us (maybe not so much in terms of start-up fundraising, but we’ll look into that next week), with 10 posts, a LinkedIn Live event, and many conversations with investors, entrepreneurs, and media (Techcrunch, Jeune Afrique, CIO mag, Bourse News…). We’re going to go back to a healthier rhythm of posting (no more spamming you three times in a week!). And for those of you who subscribe to our database, expect to receive your updated monthly database shortly…
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This was great. The more we speak about this the more likely the barriers to entry will fall.