Female-led start-ups in Africa attracted less funding in 2022 than in 2021 – Report

By Alexander Chiejina

 

Female-led and female-founded startups and ventures attracted less funding in 2022 than they did in 2021, an ‘Africa: The Big Deal’ report has revealed.

The report noted that female-led start-ups in Africa raised $188 million (4%) in 2022, while male-led ventures raised $4.6 billion (96%) – 25 times less funding has been invested in female-led start-ups in 2022, compared to their male-led counterparts. Year-on-year, the amount of funding raised by female CEOs decreased between 2021 and 2022, both in absolute ($188 million in 2022 vs. $290 million in 2021) and relative numbers (3.9% vs. 6.3%), Business A.M. observed.

“The number of $100k+ deals announced by female-led start-ups has also seen a YoY decrease, absolutely (128 in 2022 vs. 141 in 2021) and relatively (13% vs. 16%). While we could have feared that the tougher context in H2 would have translated in even lower numbers for female CEOs, it turns out that they did better in the second half of the year (6% of funding) compared to H1 (2.8%). The number of $100k+ saw the same upward trend with 15% of deals bagged by female CEOs in H2, up from 11% in H1,” the report explained.

Business A.M. observed that male-only founding teams (whether a single male founder or an all-male founding team) continued to attract the vast majority of funding in 2022: 85%, up from 83% in 2021. Female-only founding teams raised more in 2022 ($115 million, 2.4%) than in 2021 ($44 million, 0.9%), though this progress was somewhat cancelled by a decrease of funding going to gender-diverse founding teams (from 16% in 2021 to 13% in 2022).

“In terms of [the] number of $100k+ deals, the split was almost identical between 2021 and 2022: 73% male-only, 19% gender-diverse, 8% female-only, pointing to the slow building of a pipe of non-male-only-founded start-ups for future funding,” the report added.

In contrast to the numbers when it came to the gender of the CEOs, the harder conditions in H2 translated into a further concentration of funding into male-only founding teams who raised 91% of all funding in H2, compared to 82% in