African Female Founders Gain Ground In Startups But Lose Even More Ground In Funding

The number of African tech startups with female founders has edged up over the past two years, but a new report shows that women-led ventures are receiving a shrinking share of venture capital, raising concerns that the ecosystem is moving backward on gender equality just as funding begins to recover.

The third edition of the “Diversity Dividend” report, released on Monday by Disrupt Africa in partnership with Madica, Thinkroom and Jumpstarter Crowdfunding, found that 19.2% of the more than 3,000 startups sampled now have at least one female co-founder, up from 17.3% in 2024. The share of startups led by a female CEO rose to 12.1% from 11.1%.

But progress in representation has not translated into funding. In 2025, only 16.9% of funded startups had a woman on their founding team, down from 26.3% in 2023. Just 9.6% were led by a female CEO, compared with 15.3% two years earlier. The trend has continued into 2026: of the 60 startups that raised funding in the first five months of the year, only five had a female CEO.

“Diversity is not going to increase if diverse startups cannot access the funding they need to grow,” said Gabriella Mulligan, co-founder of Disrupt Africa.

The findings point to a widening gap between the growing number of women entering the startup world and the capital available to scale their businesses. In 2025, female-founded startups accounted for just 0.9% of the USD 3.2 B raised by African tech companies, the lowest share in four years. In the first quarter of 2026, startups with a woman CEO or at least one woman co-founder raised just USD 49 M out of USD 597 M, or 8.2% of total funding.

The report surveyed more than 3,000 startups and included interviews with founders and investors across the continent. It identified persistent biases in fundraising, including questions about female founders’ personal lives that are rarely asked of men, and a tendency among some investors to suggest that women-led teams need a male co-founder to be taken seriously.

“We’ve heard it before, and we’ll continue to hear it. Getting past representation and specifically gender equality requires much more than ‘choosing diversity’,” said Akinyi W. Ooko Ombaka, head of portfolio success at Madica. “It necessitates creating a real environment for equitable opportunities to thrive.”

Some investors are pushing back against the trend. Madica, an Africa-focused pre-seed programme affiliated with Flourish Ventures, has backed 13 companies across 11 sectors and eight countries, with 53.85% led by female CEOs and 69.23% having diverse founding teams.

But such pockets of progress remain the exception. The report concludes that while small steps have been taken towards greater gender diversity, the sector remains far from parity. With African tech funding rebounding after a prolonged downturn, the risk is that women founders will be left behind in the recovery.

Image Credit: Flickr