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Female-led start-ups attracted less than 7% of all funding in Africa in 2021. And it wasn't actually as bad as previous years...
We have looked at fundraising in Africa with a gender less before (check out this post, or this one), but not so much from a country perspective, so this week we’ll do just that. First of all, a very small portion of the funding in Africa goes to start-ups with a female CEO: about 6.5% in 2021. That’s $1 in every $15 raised. Though incredibly low, it was much higher in 2021 than in previous years, both in relative and absolute terms (nearly $300m, 7x YoY). But the numbers hide strong discrepancies between countries. Indeed, Kenya performed very well compared to the other ‘Big Four’ markets, in particular in 2019 and 2021, when 17% and 29% of the funding raised in the country went to female CEOs, respectively. Kenya actually drives the overall numbers, though its weight is slowly decreasing: 41% of all funding raised by female CEOs in Africa in 2021 was raised in Kenya (down from 52% in 2020 and 61% in 2019). On the opposite side of the spectrum, Egypt performs very poorly: of the nearly $900m raised by start-ups in Egypt between 2019 and 2021, less than $4m (0.4%) were raised by female-led ventures. Numbers in both South Africa and Nigeria improved significantly between 2020 and 2021, growing 16x and 12x YoY respectively. Each claimed roughly a quarter of the funding raised by female CEOs on the continent in 2021. Also worth noting is the fact that of the $408m raised by female-led start-ups since 2019 (out of $9.3b in total), 2/3 were raised by 10 just 10 start-ups, 5 of which were in Kenya (Gro Intelligence, AZA, Angaza, Guidewheel, Pula), 2 in South Africa (Cape Bio Pharms, Spark Schools), 2 in Nigeria (Nithio, Sabi), and 1 in Zimbabwe (PayItUp). Now, can these very early signs of improvement be sustained, and translate into systemic change? Hopefully, but not according to the 2022 numbers so far: as of the end of Q1, the percentage of funding raised by female-led start-ups is at its lowest compared to the past three years…
I know, I know, this week’s post was a bit late. Sorry! I love writing those, but sometimes the sun is shining outside, and you try life in the real world, and just like endless scrolling on Twitter, you can’t get enough of it… ;)
And remember, if you’re an African SME with $1.25m+ in annual revenue, and you’re looking for growth/working capital through debt investments, you can check out AfricInvest’s DealRoom (hosted by Asoko Insight): they’re actively building their pipeline of debt deals…
