Why is only 2% of funding going to female founders?

The Flip

Despite research showing that female founders outperform their male peers, startups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding in Africa last year. There is a huge gender funding gap. How do we close it?

This episode is the first of a five-episode series on gender lens investing, co-hosted by Eloho Omame, Founding Partner of First Check Africa, an early-stage fund backing female-led startups. Each episode of this series will explore a different level of the fundraising value chain.

In this episode, we're joined by the founders: Yanmo Omarogbe, the Co-founder and COO of the Nigerian investment platform Bamboo, and Sneha Mehta, the Co-founder and CEO of Uncover, a direct-to-consumer skincare brand in Kenya.

00:00 - Intro
02:00 - Yanmo & Sneha's fundraising experiences
13:19 - If tech companies raise more money, should more women start tech companies?
19:55 - What does "the ecosystem" need to be doing more of to help female founders?
25:26 - The added burdens for female founders
32:18 - What does success look like?
38:15 - Is money raised the right metric?
41:36 - The 2% Ceiling
47:30 - A retrospective conversation with Eloho & Justin

This series is created under the ScaleX project: Co-designing Solutions to close the early stage gender-financing gap in Africa, an initiative of Make-IT in Africa.

Make-IT in Africa promotes entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems across Africa for green and inclusive development. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH implements this project on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

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