Female solo business founders and all-women founding teams received less than one per cent of tracked funding across African markets, compared with 91 per cent for male solo founders and all-male teams, figures cited at the She Code Africa Summit 2026 have shown.

The figures, from Africa: The Big Deal reports, were cited by the Managing Partner of B4B Partners, Napa Onwusah, during a discussion on women’s participation in technology and investment at the summit, which marked the organisation’s 10th anniversary.

Onwusah said mixed-gender founding teams accounted for eight per cent of the funding, highlighting a significant disparity in capital allocation to women-founded businesses.

She called for more women to become capital allocators, arguing that increasing female representation within investment firms would not be sufficient to close the funding gap.

She said that although women’s participation in technology had improved, their representation declined at higher levels of leadership.

According to her, women account for almost 50 per cent of STEM graduates, but only 23 to 30 per cent of technology roles, nearly 12 per cent of technology leadership positions and 10 per cent of technology startup chief executives.

Onwusah urged women to move beyond participation in the technology ecosystem to building businesses, developing products, funding ventures and sponsoring other women.

She also called for stronger technical depth, product thinking, commercial acumen and strategic judgment among women seeking to build and lead technology businesses.

At a session on raising capital, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Shuttlers, Damilola Olokesusi, said the company spent its first four years building its transportation business without external investment, relying on grants and customer revenue.

Olokesusi said she joined buses as a conductor to understand the transportation business and gain first-hand knowledge of its operational challenges.

She said the company eventually reached a point where it could no longer scale through bootstrapping, prompting it to seek external capital to develop its technology and expand its customer base.

She advised founders to understand their businesses, build relationships with investors and communicate their value proposition and growth potential effectively.

Olokesusi also urged female entrepreneurs to determine the type of business they wanted to build before choosing a funding model, noting that venture capital might not be appropriate for every business.

Also speaking, Principal, Platform and Networks at Ventures Platform Fund, Damilola Teidi-Ayoola, said founders seeking investment needed a strong understanding of their businesses, industries, customers and financial performance.

She said entrepreneurs must communicate their business stories effectively and understand the type of capital suited to their operations, noting that some businesses might be better served by debt or revenue-based financing than equity.

Teidi-Ayoola also urged investors and support organisations to address biases that affect women founders, saying programmes open to both men and women still attract significantly fewer applications from women.

Esther Otusanya of Endeavor Nigeria said investors also considered a business’s cost structure, the founder’s ability to work with others and the strength of the management team when assessing its potential to scale.
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She said founders needed to demonstrate how capital would be deployed to achieve specific milestones, such as expanding into new markets, increasing revenue or creating new revenue streams, while encouraging women who had not raised capital to apply for structured programmes.
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Founder, She Code Africa, Ada Nduka, said they have evolved from a storytelling initiative launched in 2016 into a structured organisation providing learning opportunities, scholarships and other support for women in technology. Nduka said the initiative initially focused on making women in technology visible through storytelling, but later recognised that visibility alone was insufficient without access to resources, mentorship and opportunities to apply their skills.
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Nduka said the organisation has impacted 65,000 women and girls, adding that its impact should be measured by the lives changed and opportunities created.
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Nduka called on employers, educators, investors, policymakers and other organisations to work together to create inclusive workplaces, make technical learning accessible and expand opportunities for women-led businesses.
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She said the next decade requires women to move beyond seeking seats at decision-making tables to helping design them and shape the future of technology in Africa.