🤦♂️2024🤦♀️ It's a Man's Man's Man's World.
Female CEO & Female founder representation reached an all-time low last year
Previously, on Africa: The Big Deal: Despite a slow start, fintechs raised almost half of all the start-up funding in 2024. Climate Tech held up… Full episode:
There is no way to sugarcoat this: 2024 has been abysmal when it comes to the representation of female-led and female-founded ventures in start-up funding (exc. exits) on the continent, as both reached an all-time low since we’ve started collecting the data in 2019. The title of one of my early 2021 analysis on gender - ‘Crumbs, basically.’ - sadly comes to my mind…
Female CEOs attracted only $48m in funding in 2024 (exc. exits). This is more than 4x times less than in 2023. Comparatively, nearly $2.2b went to their male counterparts in 2024. Absolute levels so low hadn’t been registered since 2020. Even more concerning is the fact that in relative terms, female CEOs received only 2% of the total invested last year, a share that has never been so small. As a reminder, in our analysis in September last year, we found that only four of the 100 most-funded start-ups in Africa since 2019 currently had a female CEO. Actually, since Kobo360’s Cikü Mugambi resigned in November, this number is now down to three…
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And looking at the gender mix of the founding teams won’t bring us any solace. Indeed, in 2024 only $123m went to gender-diverse founding teams, and $21m to solo female founders or all-female founding teams. In comparison, solo male founders raised $430m and all-male founding teams $1.6b. The gap is even more striking if we look at percentages: 1% for solo female founders or all-female founding teams; 5.5% for gender-diverse founding teams; and 95.5% for solo male founders or all-male founding teams. In other words, 99% of the funding was invested in start-ups with at least a male founder, vs. 6.5% in start-ups with at least a female founder. As for female CEOs, we’ve never seen stats so poor since we started tracking the data in 2019…
Even when the story isn’t very positive, we always challenge ourselves to look for some kind of silver-lining. In this case though, we couldn’t really find it in the data. However, we know for a fact that there are talented female CEOs and co-founders with great potential on the continent. And diversity in founders - starting with gender - should really be giving ventures an edge when fundraising… Anyways… If you need access to the underlying data (i.e. the 3.5k+ deals we’ve been tracking since 2019), you can access our full database with a little discount here. Actually, if you’re a female CEO or female founder in Africa, feel free to reach out to Maxime or myself, and we’ll happily give you a 75% DISCOUNT.
👉UP NEXT👉 Our LinkedIn Live on Thursday morning of course! Will you be there? And btw…
 | A guest post by
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What we need is an enabling environment and initiative that encourage more founders; then females will rise in participation.