Ms Ife Durosinmi-Etti, the founder and CEO of Herconomy, has discussed the challenges she faced when raising funds for her company.
In a recent interview with CNN, the entrepreneur revealed that it was difficult because women in the tech ecosystem struggle to get the attention of investors, unlike their male counterparts.
What I’ve noticed in the tech space is that women are over-mentored and underfunded. We need to do more to fund more women and ensure that their businesses actually grow from small businesses to big businesses, she stated.
However, Ms Durosinmi-Etti concluded, “While funding is very difficult for women to get, some women are getting it, and it is opening up. Things are changing.”
According to the World Bank, all-female start-ups received only 3% of the nearly $2 billion invested in African tech start-ups between 2013 and 2021.
Ms Fara Ashiru Jituboh’s Okra raised $3.5 million in venture capital (VC) funding in 2021, describing the period as “one of the biggest funding years generally across the board,” noting that nearly $6 billion was attracted into technology companies.
In addition, Ms Phiona Okumu, Spotify’s Head of Music for Sub-Saharan Africa, told CNN that the brand was growing alongside the region’s young population.
She acknowledged the musical complexities of the continent, adding that it is important to “know that the world is ready and read indicators like the popularity and growth of different genres from the continent becoming billboard hits in the US, for example.”
We’ve seen such amazing success from artists like Wizkid, who is now a billboard artist, something that 10 years ago we might have only dreamed of. I think that’s also very much a result of what streaming is doing in the music world as a whole. It’s enabling discovery, she added.
A lot of Africa is unbanked and does not use credit cards”. To best cater to its new market, Spotify leveraged a partnership with M-PESA, a mobile payment service which is local to Kenya.
We are continuing to ensure that we partner with different service providers across the continent to make sure that the lifestyle of the audience that we want to court also makes sense to the product or makes sense with the product, Ms Okumu stated.
Spotify launched in South Africa in 2018 and in 38 more African countries in 2021.
