With less than seven per cent of women-led businesses receiving the basic capital need to thrive in their field, an initiative of ElectHer, Africa Female Founders Collective (AFFC) in partnership with Caring Africa launched recently to help prospective investors connect with businesses seeking funding.

At an evening of cocktail reception and conversation on high-growth female led ventures held at Capital Club in Lagos women from all various fields including tech, agriculture, finance, fashion, beauty and manufacturing were present.

“It’s about scalability and investing. Why getting capital from financial firms is an issue and donors are not funding, financing and investing in female led businesses, the conversation is to see through the lens of the investor and female founders and understand what the women’s issues and perspectives are.”

“AFFC is all about carrying an ecosystem that can drive the scalability of Female-led businesses on the continent. Female Founders in this context can mean the female-led businesses and female-grown businesses, and the goal is to draw insights from evidence-based research, to convey to that conversation, and also to ensure that we are not only creating agency, we are building a formidable network. It is important that we get women into spaces, and we give them access to market.

For Founder, Caring Africa, Blessing Adesiyan, the care sector entails women’s ability to raise funds, scale their businesses and invest the time that is required. “When we look at the numbers in the United States, less than two percent of Capital Funding go to women, this is because we just assume that women have no time. And the reason we have always had that assumption is because women are the primary care givers in any society, in any economy in the world.

“Then we start to think about why women cannot scale their businesses or not seen as investable? I truly believe that women are being held back, whether it is intentional or unintentional, because we are being seen as the primary caregivers. And so, it is left for us to even truly scale anything, to even convince anyone that we are investable, that we can scale businesses.

Hence, we haven’t been able to link the care industry, or care economy to any economic projects, this is because women have always done this work behind the scenes. Caring Africa is connecting the care sector to these various economic solutions that we want. So, when we speak to investors, we’re asking them how they are solving for care. When we say we want to invest in a women led business.”

During the panel session moderated by Faborode, it had Senior Vice President, Business Development, FMDQ Securities Exchange Limited, Jumoke Olaniyan; Managing Director CrossBoundary Advisory, Efe Braimah and Founder, Moobi Baby, Omotade Alalade all shared insight on their various fields and managing funding needs as women.

For Omotade, a business owner, growing an indigenous manufacturing brand needed funding, “the banks are only after the numbers and not your emotions, which will spur them to give more.” While Olaniyan and Braimah emphaised on time poverty confronting women noting that meaningful partnerships will results as the numbers, structures are an investor’s concern in the capital market.