Africa’s Tech ecosystem has seen booming growth in the past decade with several Unicorns and innovative tech solutions breaking out from our continent to the global tech-sphere.
African women have been a huge part of this growth. Despite the scale of diversity still being largely tipped against their favor, evidenced by how African female founders got only 1% of the $5 billion raised by African startups in 2021, several female-founded startups have made headlines this year because of the remarkable strides they have taken.
This article is the first in a series of articles that will give prominence to many inspiring female founders in the African tech space and it highlights five of them from around the continent.
Honey Ogundeyi
Serial entrepreneur and founder of Fashpa.com, a fashion and lifestyle eCommerce company that connected the international market to Nigerians, and Edukoya, an EduTech platform that connects children with qualified one on one tutors, Oyindamola Honey Ogundeyi has set a name for herself as one of the leading innovators on the continent.
She was named in World Economic Forum’s Top 10 African innovators list in 2016 and she has shown devotion to making Africa a forerunner in the technology ecosystem.
Maya Horgan Famodu
Maya is the founder and managing director of Ingressive Capital, a venture capital firm targeting African tech startups. She is also a co-founder of Ingressive for Good, a nonprofit organization that facilitates tech scholarships for African youth.
According to an article by Forbes in 2020 , the Nigerian-American is the youngest black woman to launch a tech fund. Maya is developing a channel in the African ecosystem through the lifespan of a ‘techie’s journey’
Jihan Abass
Seeing that the rate of insurance coverage was low in Africa, Jihan Abass founded Lami Insurance Technology and Griffin Insurance in a bid to make insurance more accessible to Africans.
Her insurance-as-a-service app, The Griffin Motor App has shortened the purchase process of car insurance to less than 2 minutes removing the major barrier for Africans to get insured.
Thato Schermer
Considering her life’s purpose to be making premium healthcare available for everyone in her home country of South Africa, Thato Schermer co-founded Zoie Health Technologies, a digital health platform focused on women’s health and wellness.
The platform offers virtual services that include consultation, a monthly contraceptive delivery system, and a community feature that include doctors and allows for enlightening conversations among the members.
Setsabile Mkhabela
Setsabile Mkhabela is the founder of Boast-iD, a digital platform that provides e-commerce and community features for clean and sustainable, luxury fashion brands and creatives.
Starting in 2020 during the global pandemic, she noticed that the market for clean fashion brands was not as pronounced as it could be. She created the platform as a digital hub where that wasn’t just focused on selling sustainable products but also on sharing educative and enlightening content.
