As the popular saying goes, “what a man can do, a woman can do better”. Indeed the women in Africa seem to be living up to that in the area of tech. Lately, there has been an increase of women in Fintech in Africa that was initially dominated by the men popularly known as the ” tech bros”. The industry has experienced a high influx of women breaking grounds and leveraging financial technology.
According to a market research company that tracks gender diversity, it stated that around 3.2% of fintech firms in Africa are founded solely by women, doubling the global average of 1.6%. Also according to indexable 2021 data, it stated that Africa’s Fintech has more female board members compared with other regions.
An increasing number of accelerators that provide early-stage companies with training, mentorship, financing, and venture capital firms are now shifting focus to women-led businesses. Despite the perceived gender bias in the tech industry, this has not in any way deterred women from venturing into the tech ecosystem. They strongly believe that they are not different from their male counterparts in making giant strides in tech. Indeed, the results have been doing the talking, obviously showing that women can also do exceptionally well in the tech field. While the sector is very much a “men’s club”, research shows that Africa’s fintech sector fares better than other regions when it comes to women at the top.
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This article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some female trailblazers doing exceptionally well in the tech industry;
Okra: This is a female-led API fintech company based in Lagos co-founded by Fara Ashiru Jituboh. Okra was launched in 2020 to digitize financial services for Africa. Okra has built an open finance platform that enables developers and businesses to build personalized digital services and fintech products for customers. Remarkably in less than two years, the start-up has drawn more than 400 clients, including more than 20 banks in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, and has raised $4.5million in venture capital.
Lami Technologies: Founded in 2018 by Jihan Abass who is based in Nairobi, Kenya, with aims to boost almost non-existent insurance coverage among Africans. Lami’s application programming interface or API enables businesses to offer flexible digital insurance products such as vehicle and health insurance to customers. Through its API, users can get a quotation of motor, medical, or other insurance products in seconds, then customize the benefits and adjust the premium to suit their needs, and get their policy documents instantly. Since its inception, Lami has raised more than $1.8 million in seed funding and partnered with companies including Kenya commercial bank and e-commerce platform Jumia to sell more than 72,000 policies.
CrowdyVest : Tope Omotolani is the co-founder and CEO of Crowdyvest, an impact-driven community focused on creating interdependence between individuals and businesses. It provides an all-in-one financial solution geared towards achieving financial freedom while facilitating impactful growth in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Under Tope’s leadership, Crowdyvest has raised over $35 million through savings and investment for multiple businesses from a community of over 100,000 members in over a year.
With so many groundbreaking achievements from African women in tech, one would think that seeing these remarkable results by these women will jettison the issue of gender bias. Unfortunately, I am perplexed that such crude behavior is still prevalent. Female fintech founders have often lamented that when they have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to venture capital firms, gender biases still play a role, meaning they often raise less and receive lower valuations.
Despite some of these shortcomings on the part of the African women in tech, I am very ecstatic at how dogged these women have chosen to look beygrounde of these issues and still went ahead to do exceptional things in the tech ecosystem. Seeing these results from women indeed has awakened their fellow women who want to venture into the industry to see the possibility of also dominating the presumed ” men’s world”. It is advisable that venture capital firms put away their biases against some of these women and offer them the same assistance the men also get. Women indeed have what it takes to do exceptionally well in the tech industry and are currently breaking new grounds.
