Any seats for women on that rocket? 👨🚀
The proportion of funding going to female-founded and female-led start-ups in Africa remains abysmally low
We have written about gender before (here, here, here, here, here and here), and it is very likely we will have to write about gender again, given the very little progress - if any - that is being made when it comes to female-founded and female-led start-ups funding in Africa.
If we look first at founding teams, 84% of all the funding raised by start-ups in Africa since 2019 ($9.8bn) has gone to either a single male founder, or a male-only founding team. About 15% of the money went to gender-diverse founding teams. Just over 1% of the funding ($146m) has gone to a single female founder, or a female-only founding team. The most concerning part is that things are not really progressing. Yes, the percentage of funding going to ‘female only’-funded start-ups so far this year is higher than in previous years, yet it is still incredibly low, and the little progress made on that front (+0.9% YoY) is largely cancelled by the relative drop in funding going to gender diverse ventures (-2.4% YoY). Think about it this way: since 2019 (that’s almost 4 years), ‘female only’-funded start-ups have raised 2.5x times less than what ‘male only’-funded start-ups raised in September 2022 alone…
Now if we look at the gender of the CEO, the numbers aren’t any better, as you might have seen in our posts on Linkedin and Twitter last week. They are correlated obviously, as the CEO tends to almost always be either the founder, or one of the co-founders. But still. In 2022 so far, we’re looking at 97% of the total funding going to start-ups led by a male CEO. And there is no sign of a positive trend here either, as the percentage of funding going to female-led organisations keeps oscillating between 3% and 6% since 2019.
When we were looking for a silver-lining in 2021 (and we had to look hard!), we realised that the proportion of the funding going to gender-diverse founding teams where the CEO was a woman (basically one of the female co-founders) was on the rise: it had gone from 23% in 2019 and 2020, to 33% in 2021. Unfortunately, the trend has completely reversed in 2022 so far as only 12% of the funding going to gender-diverse founding team has been invested in ventures led by a female CEO…
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