Afrigather This text was contributed to TechCabal and co-authored by Sarah Dusek, Founding father of Enygma Ventures; Tebogo Mokwena, Founding father of Akiba Digital
Are you tackling a giant downside that solves world challenges? Does your resolution enhance the lives of bizarre individuals? Is there a big sufficient market to attain progress and scale?
Over the past 3 years, there was an improved concentrate on, and help for, women-led companies in Africa. In 2021, feminine founders throughout the continent attracted $288 million in funding, which is significantly greater than the $52 million achieved simply two years prior1. However whereas that is a formidable shift, female-led startups are nonetheless receiving significantly decrease enterprise funding than male-led startups.
African feminine entrepreneurs neither discover themselves in the back of the funding ladder as a result of they lack enterprise expertise; nor as a result of they don’t work as arduous as their male counterparts. Somewhat, the shortfall of funding for ladies may be attributed to a laundry checklist of causes, stemming from a historical past of exclusion and the day by day socio-cultural challenges that African ladies face consequently.
In addressing this imbalance, mentorship programmes have been designed to help feminine founders. In these programmes, rising feminine entrepreneurs are matched to mentors who’ve related trade expertise and expose them to founder-focused schooling.
Whereas we should not detract from the affect these programmes have on supporting the subsequent era of feminine founders; we should keep in mind that principle is nothing with out follow and follow is ineffectual with out data.
If we wish to successfully assist feminine founders construct impactful companies, we now have to offer them with the knowledge they should inform their decision-making. On the subject of fundraising, this implies informing feminine founders on the metrics traders use to guage potential portfolio firms.
And the query on everybody’s thoughts is that this: what do traders search for in a possible portfolio firm?
For ladies-focused enterprise capital agency, Enygma Ventures, these 3 questions are key:
- Are you tackling a giant downside that solves world challenges?
- Does your resolution enhance the lives of bizarre individuals?
- Is there a big sufficient market to attain progress and scale?
If women-owned startups are in a position to appropriately reply these questions, they stand an infinitely higher likelihood at securing funding.
An instance of that is Akiba Digital, which lately secured a pre-seed increase of US$1.1 million. Akiba Digital attributes a lot of its success to the enterprise’s foundational perception in harnessing the ability of know-how to scale back monetary boundaries to entry and help larger inclusion (thereby answering query one), by enabling small companies to unlock financing by means of specialised lending companions (query two). That is marked by the companies intent to scale to over 20,000 small companies within the medium-term (query three).
By addressing these queries, startups successfully talk to traders that they’ve a marketing strategy in place that’s reasonable – whereas not being overly optimistic – and may obtain outcomes. From right here, it is usually simpler to reply extra particular questions, akin to: Do you could have a minimal-viable product? What’s your buyer acquisition value? And, what’s the buyer lifetime worth of your resolution?
Given that girls have a larger trickle-down impact on the communities they serve, it goes with out saying that rising our funding into feminine founders is nice for each the financial system and society at massive. A mannequin instance of that is Black Mamba, which actively helps feminine farmers to develop their chilli merchandise. The earnings generated is basically the one earnings for rural communities in Eswatini, which places kids by means of faculty and allows individuals to earn a residing staying of their communities somewhat than migrating to cities.
However, to grasp the affect that feminine founders have of their societies, and entice investments, extra feminine founders want to begin considering like traders.
