Female Founders in Africa Receive Less VC Funding than Men

• African women-founded startups attract much less venture capital investment than those founded by men
• Just 10% of female-founded startups in Nigeria received funding from 2019-2023

The African venture capital market has been characterized by a huge gap, where female startup founders have accessed a small fraction of the funding that preceded to male startup founders.

Based on the data from TechCabal Insights, female startup owners have accessed funding amounting to $48 million, whereas male startup owners have accessed funding above $2 billion. Furthermore, just 10 percent of female startups in Nigeria accessed funding between 2019 and 2023.

However, a recent report by the African Private Capital Association (AVCA) released in January 2026 offers a different perspective.

The report shows that even though the gender group that receives capital is still composed of men, there are an increased number of females participating in investment decisions in Africa, and their levels surpass the global average.

Based on data from 218 investors who manage nearly 2,000 portfolio companies, the report by the AVCA, ‘Gender Diversity in African Private Capital’, indicates that women comprise 44 percent of the overall labor force in Africa's private equity community while 38 percent of the members of the investee industry are women, significantly above the global ratio of 35 percent but now above the ratio of 24 percent in Europe.

Moreover, women occupy 33 percent of the seats on Investment Committees (ICs) in the African continent, more than twice the global average of 12 percent.

There seems to be a link, according to the report, between the composition of the Investment Committees and the disbursal of funds. Majority female investment committees allocate more to female-led companies (48 percent of portfolio, compared to only 8 percent by majority male investment committees).

The report sheds light on this structural mismatch and states that gender diversity is particularly common in smaller, privately held venture capital funds, which control less capital and hence less of the flows, while the larger firms, with predominantly male investment teams, control the majority of the capital allocated to Africa.

Besides the moral case for gender inclusion, the report by AVCA also sets out some economic ones. Female-led portfolio companies experienced a 32 percent revenue growth from 2023 to 2024, while male-led firms grew at 14 percent.

Data shows that Africa is on course to outpace many developed markets in terms of building gender diversity in its private equity and venture capital sectors at a rate envied by any market on the planet.

The test for the industry moving forward will be ensuring that the strategies female-led firms deploy to plug this funding gap is replicated by the continent's largest capital allocators.