Women-led startups continue to receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital in Africa, even as the continent’s broader startup investment landscape shows signs of recovery after two difficult years.
Less than 10 per cent of all venture funding deployed across Africa in 2025 went to companies with at least one female founder, according to the ‘Africa Investment Report 2025’ by research firm Briter. The figure underscores the persistence of gender-based disparities in capital allocation, despite a modest rebound in overall investment activity.
African startups raised about $3.8 billion in disclosed funding across more than 630 deals in 2025, with deal volumes increasing year-on-year. However, capital remained heavily concentrated among a small group of late-stage companies and a narrow set of sectors, limiting the spillover benefits of the rebound for women-led ventures.
“Less than two percent of capital today is going into female businesses in Africa. If you start to invest when no one else is looking, you can capture some of the best investments,” Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, founder of Aruwa Capital Management, told BusinessDay.
Briter’s report shows that women founders were particularly excluded from large funding rounds. Mega-deals of $50 million and above accounted for roughly a quarter of all disclosed funding value in 2025, yet these transactions were largely captured by male-led or male-dominated founding teams, reinforcing gender gaps at the scale-up stage.
“The gender funding gap is not a short-term anomaly; it is structural,” the report noted, citing barriers such as limited access to investor networks, lower investor risk tolerance toward women-led ventures, and the concentration of capital in capital-intensive sectors like fintech infrastructure, energy, and mobility, where female founders remain underrepresented.
While women-led startups were more visible at early stages, particularly in education, health, agriculture, and social-impact-driven businesses, their ability to scale was significantly constrained. Median deal sizes for early-stage companies remained relatively low in 2025, and follow-on funding proved difficult to secure as investors prioritised capital efficiency and established revenue models.
Complementary findings from a Moniepoint report titled ‘Funding Nigeria’s Women-Owned Businesses- A Case Study on Moniepoint’s Working Capital Loans’ illustrate the financing pressures women entrepreneurs face.
The report found that 40.2 per cent of women rely on personal funds and savings to start or sustain their businesses, while 59.8 per cent seek external financing, often from family and friends in the form of loans or cash gifts.
Despite these efforts, the report estimated a financing gap of 32 per cent, with women entrepreneurs less likely to secure funding or receive smaller ticket sizes compared to their male counterparts. This gap becomes more pronounced as businesses grow, reinforcing the underrepresentation of women in later-stage funding rounds.
Industry stakeholders argue that policy and institutional reforms are critical to closing this deficit. Fifehan Osikanlu, founder of Eden Venture Group, said supportive government policies are essential to improving access to capital for female-led businesses in Nigeria.
Osasu Igbinedion-Ogwuche, founder of TOS Group, highlighted the role of banks in easing access to credit. “Collateral remains one of the biggest barriers preventing women from accessing loans. Banks must create interventions that allow women running small and medium-scale enterprises to access funding without stringent collateral requirements,” she said.
She added that repayment data already supports the case for reform. “About 95 percent of Nigerian women have already proven their creditworthiness to repay their loans on time. It’s time for policymakers and financial institutions to recognise this and implement solutions that enable women to grow and scale their businesses.”
Briter’s analysis also points to geographic and sectoral concentration as compounding factors. The so-called ‘Big Four’ ecosystems: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt, continued to dominate funding flows in 2025, leaving women founders in frontier and breakout markets facing even steeper barriers to capital access.
Despite the bleak equity funding picture, the rise of alternative financing instruments, including grants, debt, and blended finance, offers a potential pathway to broaden access for women entrepreneurs. However, analysts caution that without deliberate intervention from investors, limited partners, and policymakers, equity capital is unlikely to rebalance organically.
Sarah Ngamau, managing director and partner at Moremi Fund, told BusinessDay that bold target-setting by large funds is necessary to drive meaningful change. “We need audacious targets at both fund and portfolio levels. More female partners, more carry allocated to women, and portfolio benchmarks—like 20 percent female-founded companies to start, building toward 50 percent,” she said.
Separate data from Africa: The Big Deal shows that total startup funding across equity, debt, and grants (excluding exits) rose to $3.2 billion in 2025, a 40 percent increase from $2.2 billion in 2024. The rebound followed consecutive declines after funding fell from about $3.1 billion in 2023 amid global monetary tightening and valuation corrections.
Yet the recovery has done little to alter the structural imbalances shaping Africa’s venture capital landscape. For women-led startups, the funding rebound has so far reinforced existing inequalities rather than narrowed them, raising questions about whether Africa’s next growth cycle will be meaningfully inclusive without intentional shifts in capital allocation.
