Fewer than 10 per cent of African tech startups are led by a female CEO, while less than 15 per cent even have a female co-founder, according to a groundbreaking study on gender diversity released by Disrupt Africa.
Since launching its research arm in 2016, Disrupt Africa has built up a significant portfolio of publications, most notably the African Tech Startups Funding Report, Finnovating for Africa, and deep-dives into various leading startup ecosystems, available free for all via open-sourcing initiatives with various partners across the continent’s tech ecosystem.
Its latest publication, its 21st in total, is the company’s most ambitious ecosystem research project to date – focusing on gender equality in the African tech startup landscape, “Diversity Dividend: Exploring Gender Equality in the African Tech Ecosystem”.
Powered by Madica, an Africa-focused pre-seed investment programme empowering underrepresented and underfunded mission-driven founders on the continent, and also supported by FirstCheck Africa, TLcom Capital, LoftyInc Capital Management, Google for Startups, RevUp Women by AfriLabs, iceaddis, the International Trade Centre, and Janngo Capital, the report lays bare the lack of gender diversity both within startup teams and funding rounds on the continent.
One key finding is that African tech certainly does have a gender problem when it comes to women within leadership positions at startups. Of the 2,395 startups tracked for the purposes of this publication, only 350 – or 14.6 per cent – have at least one female co-founder, while just 230 (9.6%) have a woman CEO.
While there are increasingly more opportunities to make the sector more welcoming and attractive to females, it is clear from the data that African tech remains a male-dominated landscape, and that there is serious work to be done in order to get women anywhere near parity from a leadership perspective within the space.
Gender diversity clearly varies from country to country, but no one market has more than 23 per cent of its startups counting a female co-founder or CEO amongst its founding team. Generally, in markets with enough tracked startups to discern any trends, the smaller ecosystems outperform the larger ones from a diversity perspective, with greater ratios of female leaders in markets such as Zambia, Rwanda, Tunisia and Senegal than in traditional hotspots such as South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya.
When it comes to sectors, similar ratios apply, with even the most diverse sectors seeing female representation hovering at the mid-to-low twenties percentage level. The best-performing sectors in this regard are legal-tech, e-health, recruitment and HR, ed-tech, and e-commerce and retail-tech. Fintech, by far the leading vertical in terms of number of startups, and indeed investment, performs relatively poorly, with just 13.8 per cent of fintech ventures having a female co-founder and only 7.6 per cent having a woman CEO.
To download the report for free, please go here, or email Gabriella on [email protected], or Tom on [email protected].