The Ingredients Helping Africa’s Women Entrepreneurs Succeed

By Jason Hopps

An hour north of Nairobi, the late autumn sun is drying a field covered with macadamia nut shells, rice husks, flower stalks, and sawdust.

After weeks of punishing rains, the warmth and blue skies are bringing relief to millions of Kenyans, including entrepreneur Mary Nyambura, the founder and CEO of renewable fuel business Ecocharge Limited.

Ecocharge rescues and repurposes agricultural waste products, sorting, drying, and compressing them into biomass briquettes. The company sells these in 50 kg bags to homes, schools, and businesses across Kenya for more environmentally friendly—and cost-effective—heating and cooking.

“The rains have been the worst I’ve ever known, and we had to stop production because we couldn’t dry our raw materials,” said Nyambura, who founded Ecocharge in 2019 and now sells more than 20,000 tons of briquettes annually. “But we are drying and processing again and business is better.”

As talented and experienced a businesswoman as she is, the weather is one thing Nyambura can’t control. However, thanks to years of hard work, she has mastered other vital elements affecting her fortunes, including accessing finance and winning contracts.

“There have been times I haven’t been taken seriously as a woman in business, but I’ve learned to overcome those attitudes,” she said. “I was raised by a single mom and always knew how hard women had to work…I always wanted to be independent, and you have to stand your ground, especially in the business world.”

High Hurdles

Across Africa, millions of women are running businesses large and small, from CEOs of high-tech firms to the countless number of mama mbogas (‘women selling vegetables’) who can be found selling fruits and vegetables from wooden stalls in almost every neighborhood in Kenya and elsewhere.

By some estimates, Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurial activity in the world at about 24 percent. This is partly because formal job opportunities are limited—but it also underscores how African women are taking their destinies into their own hands.

Even so, persistent cultural biases, and outdated legal systems present high hurdles to entrepreneurial women in Africa, who have only recently begun enjoying the support they need to launch and grow their own businesses.

The World Bank Group’s 2024 Women, Business, and the Law report details the many obstacles holding women back, noting that no country provides full equal opportunities for women—not even the wealthiest economies.

In Africa, women can struggle with access to childcare, equal pay, and workplace harassment, among other challenges. In some African countries, women still need their husband or male partner to co-sign a loan, mortgage application, or the papers necessary to start a business.

All this severely limits a woman’s ability to launch a business or progress her career. And even when countries do pass laws to improve gender equality—and African countries are recently among the top reformers, according to the 2024 report—implementing and enforcing those regulations remains a challenge.

“Increasing women's economic participation is the key to amplifying their voices and shaping decisions that affect them directly,” said Tea Tumbric, Manager for the Women, Business and the Law project and the report’s author. “In Africa, women entrepreneurs face a unique set of challenges and identifying exactly what they are—and how they are impacting women—is an important first step to helping address them.”

Pulling many levers

Supporting women to achieve parity of opportunity in Africa’s private sector is complicated.

That is why banks, other financial institutions, and development finance institutions – including IFC – are pulling many levers to support women in business, recognizing that the solutions must be as diverse and impactful as the problems.

“For IFC, helping women access financing is important, but we are also providing women in Africa with training, networking, and access to markets, especially traditionally male-dominated industries, such as construction or manufacturing,” said Anne Kabugi, IFC’s Regional Gender Lead for Africa and coordinator of IFC’s She Wins Africa program. “We also work with partners to amplify our impact.”

One of those partners is the Baobab Group, which provides financial services and training to hundreds of thousands of small businesses in seven West African countries, with a specific focus on supporting women entrepreneurs.

In Senegal, for example, Baobab’s Credit Jappo program (jappo means “together” in Wolof, a West African language) provides funding to women in cooperatives or associations, including those producing and selling soaps, tea, and other agricultural products.

“Women are important customers for us because they are usually better savers and often better entrepreneurs than men,” said Hervé Guyon, Baobab’s General Secretary. “We realized women were underserved and decided to help them launch or grow businesses.”

Meanwhile, IFC has partnered with Nigeria’s Access Bank to deliver six-month mini-MBA courses, providing women entrepreneurs essential financial and general business training.

For Mawuse Gyisun, a Ghanaian entrepreneur who founded Sommalife in 2020 to support women farmer groups, the mini-MBA training has helped her raise more funding from investors and expand her business, which has 100,000 farmers in its network, 92 percent of them women.

“As a woman, I know I have to double my efforts to overcome negative stereotypes and succeed,” Gyisun said. “Training and networking are invaluable…I am passionate about women’s economic development, and I want to pass on what I’ve learned and inspire other women wanting to start or grow a business.”

Sourcing2Equal

At IFC’s offices in Nairobi, a group of women entrepreneurs discuss the challenges they face growing their respective businesses. Later, they meet with large companies operating in Africa to explore supply chain opportunities, learning what it takes to take on bigger, more complex contracts.

This is the IFC-led Sourcing2Equal Program (S2E) in action. Launched in 2019 in partnership with the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) and the Government of Norway, S2E is women entrepreneurs to new market opportunities via corporate procurement in Africa and other regions.

“Even though globally about one-third of smaller businesses are created by women, large corporations and governments spend less than one percent of their procurement budgets on women-led businesses,” said Kabugi. “We know women can get the job done—they just need the support and opportunities to prove it.”

In 2022, Ecocharge founder Mary Nyambura was among the entrepreneurs who participated in S2E.

“Sourcing2Equal really helped me professionalize my business,” Nyambura says. “I learned important skills, realized I needed to hire a full-time accountant, and networked with other women to learn  how to work with large corporations.”

Her Fintech Edge

Digital tech is broadening financial inclusion and access to financial services, enabling those in rural or more remote areas to trade and access market information with their smart phones.

However, because men are more likely than women to own a smart phone or be connected to the Internet in Africa, there exists a stubborn ‘digital divide’, according to a UN report, among other research.

Her Fintech Edge, a recent report from IFC and Dalberg that surveyed fintechs across 17 countries, including in Africa, found that women on average constitute less than 25 percent of fintech customers—and that only about a third of those fintech firms tailor their products and services to women.

The good news is that by using business strategies informed by analyzing sex-disaggregated data, fintech firms could capitalize on the women's market while contributing to greater financial inclusion for women. 

Furthermore, the majority of fintech firms consider women to be more loyal, less risky, and more or equally valuable customers than men.

“We used to speak about the three things that women in business must master to succeed—confidence, capability, and capital—and tailor our programs to address those needs,” said Nathalie Gabala, IFC’s Global Director Gender and Economic Inclusion. “But we now know we also need to focus on connectivity, community, and care to support women entrepreneurs. This means digital connectivity, helping build communities of women for mutual support, and improving access to childcare.”