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.
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
