While COVID-19 has accelerated digitalization around the world, in Africa the effect is happening at an accelerated pace. A small but growing number of women at the helm of tech-enabled growth companies are leading the transformation. The profound impact is being felt across different sectors — from fintech, cleantech and health to logistics, agriculture and e-commerce — providing grassroot opportunities for Africa’s next generation of women leaders.
Africa’s quiet technology revolution
According to a recent article in FT, Africa’s 1.3 billion people are transacting digitally at an unprecedented rate. The article explains, “This mirrors the first quiet revolution in mobile technology over a decade ago, when many countries on the continent managed to leapfrog much more developed ones — because nearly non-existent fixed connectivity meant there were no legacy systems to have to bring up to date — and shifted entirely to mobile.”
YPO member and Managing Partner of Acuity Ventures, Lexi Novitske, recognized the opportunity in 2012. She left her hedge fund job in New York City to head an investment company in Lagos, Nigeria, Africa’s largest city, and home to the continent’s most active startup ecosystem. Since then, her company has helped support entrepreneurs in fintech, artificial intelligence (AI), logistics, and health tech companies, including market leaders such as Flutterwave and mPharma.
“In a market where a couple of years ago little software was being built locally, now local homegrown companies have been able to plug that gap using solutions that are priced better and local sales teams that can build bespoke solutions for enterprise customers,” says Novitske. “The growth that has happened locally is even more exciting than what you have seen in the rest of the world.”
She adds that while the pandemic in general hurt African economies, she has witnessed firsthand how quickly some companies were able to adapt and innovate, recognizing the need to cut costs and increase efficiency with rapidly adopted digital solutions. “Transactions that are digitally based are accelerating, and we are seeing a lot of companies focused on specific problems like ports and imports of goods, where technology can help improve efficiency.”
A legacy of women leadership and entrepreneurship
Globally, Africa boasts one of the world’s highest rates of women entrepreneurs. The 2020 Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs (MIWE) ranks Uganda (39.6%), Botswana (38.5%) and Ghana (36.5%) as the world’s three leading economies with the most women business owners.
While women form the backbone of African economies, accounting for a majority of small-and medium-sized businesses, only 2% of venture capital has gone to women and less than 1% to black female founders — despite the growth of technology funding passing the USD700 million market for the first time in 2020.
YPO member Agnes Gathaiya, who has held various top positions in telecommunications, banking, software applications sales and consultancy before becoming Country Director for East Africa at Google in August 2020, says, “The challenge for women in tech is a lack of senior leadership in general. One area is challenges facing women tech founders. Right now, East Africa is a hot bed of startups and innovation, with women setting up companies and trying to drive and scale them. But access to venture capital and private equity funds is beyond the reach of most women. Very few indigenous African organizations get access to investment in general and the proportion of women companies is even less.”
However, Gathaiya — who last year was named among the top 200 women in the Global Fintech Power List, making her one of only six Africans on the list — is optimistic that the current digital surge is opening up new opportunities for women in Africa to lead in this space. “After COVID-19, companies are realizing that digital transformation is not a luxury but must happen for organizations to survive. Tech is the fastest growing segment of the market, so a number of jobs are available providing more opportunities for women, including in senior positions and as founders,” she says, citing that at Google, 51% of the Kenya team are women.
Zimbabwe-based YPO member Natalie Jabangwe, Chief Executive of EcoCash, recognized as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (2018), and recently appointed to the U.N. Secretary General’s 17-member advisory task force on digital financing, adds that these opportunities are open for women leaders from different backgrounds, “Starting my career in consulting, I was an arts major, throughout school, no fundamental background in technology, yet I studied computer science in university. If a woman starts in a non-technology career you can still make it in the technology sector,” she says. “In fact, it makes you stronger as a technology leader, because you can get the balance between understanding the nuances of humanity, and creating solutions from a human perspective, helping solve problems in a more accurate way.”
A historical opportunity for advancement
Acknowledging that women globally are presented with opportunities to advance in the digital surge, Jabangwe says the development crisis on the continent is forcing Africa to embrace technology and opens up even more opportunities, especially for women. “Necessity is the mother of invention. Today, 60% of Africans have a mobile banking account. Innovation has forced us to deliver better and quicker. Where you have the deepest problem, you have the greatest opportunities,” she says. “Women have not been at the forefront of this (technological advancement), but there is no question or doubt on whether women are capable.”
As an example, she cites mobile money agent services (community bank services) in Zimbabwe, where at least 65% of the employees are women. “People are more comfortable with female agents who they trust. These women are running new age technology services,” she says. “Tech gives more opportunity for women. They can advance their skills without being given permission to sit on the table. In the same way, women are able to save. For the first time, using mobile money services or mobile banking, women are able to take care of their own finances. Financial empowerment unlocks other laterals. If I can save, I can look after myself and my children, and maybe I can invest with no permission.”
While not every woman needs to learn coding, Jabangwe says most can join teams of technology creators and start to capitalize on the movement. “You can be running an SME (small- and medium-size enterprise) with no formal technology education per se and learn how to enhance your marketing skills by shifting from traditional channels,” she says. “If, as a mother, you are not learning how to use technology in everyday life, how will you support your child in the COVID-19-propelled remote learning? If we don’t ‘get teched,’ we will be so far behind in everything, not just in technology.”
Jabangwe adds, “Women for centuries have been working from home. We are miles ahead in working-from-home culture. That is an exciting phenomenon. Women can now advance themselves in the comfort of home and fast track themselves, while most men figure out that transition. So, what was punitive becomes a real opportunity.”
5 considerations of how we can do better
Provide more role models. For U.K and U.S.-educated Jabangwe, having role models to look up to has played a critical role in her rise to senior positions. “At the early stages of my career, watching a woman of color like Michelle Obama become first lady in 2008 kept me inspired, while women like Ursula Burns, once CEO and Chairman of Xerox, an engineer and person of color like myself, gave me great courage beyond the prejudice of gender. With these sources of inspiration to draw from, I never looked back on my potential, when I was faced with hard times.”
Champion development potential of others. All the leaders interviewed have used their senior positions in corporate and other business network platforms to promote diversity. Jabangwe started a platform that features inspirational stories and role models of African women leaders under 40 ( www.africaxshow.com ) and has also also co-founded an innovation hub ( www.ibuhub.com) centered on identifying some of Africa’s innovative ideas and providing an ecosystem that supports these to scale.
— Fleur Heyns, Co-founder, Proof of Impact B.V. share
For Gathaiya, in addition to promoting diversity on her team, she has been personally involved in two initiatives looking at helping women managers advance in the technology sector: Hernovation and African Women in Fintech and Payments (AWFP). “(In Kenya) 50% of graduates from computer science are female. However, we only have five CIOs who are female, so women are not making it to the top.”
Enhance SME competitiveness across Africa. South African-based YPO member, serial entrepreneur and Co-founder of Proof of Impact B.V., Fleur Heyns, launched in 2000 one of the first global digital trading platforms on the continent. She stresses the importance of supporting SMEs, the drivers of growth in economies across sub-Saharan Africa, and mostly run by women. “We need to ensure a conducive business environment, providing SMEs with affordable access to business management information, interactive tools and training,” she says. “Currently, access to (internet) networks, with exceptions in East Africa, is not very reliable and expensive so more investment in the digital infrastructure is needed to boost work opportunities for women and empower the continent’s SMEs.”
Provide more data. Heyns also stresses the importance of providing more data and transparency on the U.N.’s Social and Development Goals (SDG) related to diversity to help draw more investment into supporting women technology company founders. “With greater data transparency showing that investing in companies led by female founders in Africa tend to deliver higher returns, made visible in real time, we can showcase proof of impact. Without data, you have risk, and investors don’t like risk.”
Create greater access to capital. For all the four tech leaders, access to capital is cited as the most significant challenge for creating opportunities for women technology leaders. Novitske says, “We allocate more investment dollars to companies with women in senior leadership positions or across the workforce. In cases where talent pools of female candidates for a given position are lacking, our companies should take active steps to strengthen training and personal development provided to employees, or the broader ecosystem,” she says. “We have to do better, and we will start with our team and our investee companies.”
