Grace Ashiru
Every year, the Partech Africa report publishes the gender numbers. Every year, the narrative is roughly the same: modest progress, persistent gaps, reasons for cautious optimism buried beneath sobering overall figures. 2025 is not a break from that pattern — but it contains enough movement to be worth examining carefully, because the type of progress matters as much as the headline numbers.
Female-founded startups raised US$254 million in equity in 2025, a 60% improvement on 2024. Their share of equity deals rose to 19% — up one percentage point year-on-year. Their share of equity funding reached 10%, up three percentage points. Male founders raised on average 8.5 times the VC funding of their female counterparts, compared to 13.2 times in 2024. The gap is narrowing.
And yet. Female founders still captured just one in ten equity dollars deployed across the continent. No female-led startup received Growth-stage equity funding in 2025. The sectors that move the most capital — Cleantech, Connectivity, Logistictech — remain almost entirely closed to female founders. The pipeline looks better than it did, but the exit looks roughly the same.
Where the Progress Is Real
The most honest way to read the gender data is to separate structural improvement from statistical noise — and 2025 contains genuine examples of both.
Start with deal count. Ninety female-founded startups raised equity in 2025. The number is still small relative to the 462 total equity deals, but it has been growing. The share of female-led deals across African tech has increased from around 13–14% in earlier years to 19% in 2025. That is a real, compounding trend — not a one-year spike.
Kenya leads by raw count, with 22 female-led equity deals, up 10% year-on-year. South Africa follows with 17, Nigeria with 16. But the more interesting data point may be Egypt, which improved its female-led deal share from 6% in 2024 to 16% in 2025. That kind of shift in a single year within a top-four market is not statistical noise — it reflects real changes in how investors in that market are allocating capital.
Morocco and Tunisia also stand out. Female-founded startups accounted for approximately 24% of total equity deals in Morocco and 38% in Tunisia. These are not large markets by absolute deal count, but the proportions are among the highest on the continent. The ecosystem conditions in North African markets — particularly the educational attainment and professional participation of women — appear to be translating into a more balanced early-stage deal environment.
Ghana ranked fourth in Africa for female-led equity deals, with female founders accounting for seven of the 14 equity deals completed in the country. Sudan, which recorded only two equity rounds in 2025, saw both of them led by female founders.
The Stage Problem
The progress at early stages has not translated into later-stage outcomes, and that is where the structural challenge becomes clearest.
In 2025, 67% of all female-led equity deals were at the Seed stage, down from 77% in 2024 — which means Series A representation improved, from 18% to 19% of female-led deals. Series B representation grew too. But Growth-stage funding — where the large cheques are written, where companies get the capital they need to scale across borders — recorded zero female-led transactions.
This is not a new problem. Growth-stage capital in Africa has always been sparse, and it tends to follow companies that were well-funded in earlier rounds. The compounding effect of earlier funding gaps — female-founded companies raising smaller Seed rounds, converting to Series A at lower rates, taking longer to reach scale — means that the pool of female-led companies eligible for Growth-stage investment in any given year is smaller to begin with.
The average ticket-size data reinforces this. At the Seed stage, the differential between male- and female-founded companies has been shrinking. But by Series B and Growth, the gap widens substantially. Fintech, which commands a pricing premium across all stages, amplifies this dynamic — female founders are underrepresented precisely in the sector that attracts the largest checks.
The Sector Map
Some of the most revealing data in the 2025 gender section relates to sector distribution.
Agritech is the standout story. Female-founded startups accounted for 39% of Agritech equity deals in 2025 and raised 58% of total Agritech equity funding. These figures are not a rounding error — they represent a sector where female founders have achieved genuine parity, and in funding terms, have actually pulled ahead. The reasons are complex: Agritech often operates at the intersection of community-level problem-solving where female founders have built real expertise and networks, and at ticket sizes where local and regional investors remain active.
Insurtech also recorded a dramatic shift. Female-founded startups raised 62% of total Insurtech equity funding in 2025, up from 7% in 2024. The driver was a small number of large transactions. With Insurtech still a relatively thin market by deal count, a single well-funded female-led company can move sector-level statistics substantially. That concentration is a caution against reading too much into the number — but it also shows what is possible when a female-led company reaches scale in a vertical where it has built genuine competitive advantage.
At the other end of the spectrum, Connectivity and Logistictech recorded zero female-founded equity deals in 2025. Mobility — despite the Lagride megadeal dominating Nigeria’s debt picture — also attracted minimal female-led equity activity. These are sectors driven by infrastructure, physical assets, and historically male-dominated networks. Without deliberate intervention from investors and ecosystem builders, the gender gap in these verticals will not close through market forces alone.
Fintech, Enterprise, and E-commerce collectively recorded the most female-led deals: 16, 16, and 14 respectively. But in each of these sectors, female founders accounted for around 16–18% of deal activity — meaningful participation, but not yet parity.
The Debt Dimension
One of the more complex gender data points in 2025 involves debt financing. Female-founded startups raised US$223 million in debt — a 42-fold increase on 2024. Their share of debt deals jumped from 10% to 24%.
The story, as noted in the debt section of this series, requires a footnote. A single transaction — Tala, the Kenya-based lending platform — accounted for two-thirds of that total. Tala is a legitimate business that has earned its scale, and its ability to access large debt facilities is genuinely significant as a proof point. But it should not be confused with a broad market shift.
Remove Tala, and the remaining 25 female-founded companies that raised debt in 2025 accounted for roughly 5% of total debt funding, up from 1% in 2024. That is real progress. The average debt ticket size for female-founded companies more than doubled year-on-year. Access is widening. But it is widening slowly, and from a low base.
The more meaningful signal may be the deal count: 26 female-founded companies accessed debt in 2025, compared to 8 in 2024. That is a tripling of the number of companies, which speaks to structural change rather than one outlier deal.
What the Numbers Cannot Capture
The gender data in the Partech report, like all quantitative gender analysis in venture capital, measures what it can measure: disclosed deals, reported amounts, verifiable founders. It cannot easily capture the deals that were pitched but never funded, the companies that were built but never reached the stage of institutional fundraising, or the systemic biases that operate before a pitch deck is ever opened.
Research across global venture markets has consistently found that female founders face higher scrutiny at pitch stage, are asked different questions (about risk mitigation rather than upside capture), and receive lower initial offers that compound into smaller outcomes over time. There is no reason to believe Africa is structurally different in these respects. The 19% share of deals and 10% share of funding in 2025 are not primarily a supply-side problem — they are a demand-side problem.
What that means practically is that changing the gender numbers in African tech requires changing investor behaviour, not just founder pipelines. Building more female-founded companies will help, but it will not be sufficient if the capital allocation process remains biased at the point of decision.
The Trajectory
The honest summary is that African tech is making slow, measurable progress on gender equity — but “slow” and “measurable” may not be fast enough given the compounding nature of the disadvantage.
The sectors where female founders are gaining ground are meaningful: Agritech, Insurtech, E-commerce. The geographies where progress is most visible — Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana — represent a broad enough spread to suggest that this is not a single-country story. The debt data, Tala notwithstanding, shows that female-led companies are reaching the scale required to access structured financing.
But the Growth stage remains closed. The largest capital pools are not yet flowing to female-led companies at scale. And the sectors that attract the most capital — Cleantech in particular — remain almost entirely male-dominated at the equity level.
The target is not just to increase the percentage of female-led deals year on year. It is to change the composition of the companies that get to the Growth stage in the first place. That requires changes in the Seed and Series A decision-making processes that will not show up in the data for three to five years.
The good news is that the early-stage pipeline, imperfect as it is, is growing. The bad news is that patience has its own cost.
