Thriving women in STEM to access finance

Entrepreneurs contributed $1.55 trillion to Africa’s GDP in 2023 but face challenges of funding access, infrastructure costs, unsavoury macroeconomic conditions, and restrictive government policies. SMMEs are vital to Africa’s economy employing over 80% of the population and contributing to 50% of the $3.1 trillion GDP, but lack of capital hampers growth especially for women. Female entrepreneurs have raised less capital due to the lack of diversity in capital allocators. Current funding mechanisms have largely been through debt, with high-interest rates. In one of our case studies, interest charges were between 35-40% on debt. For female founders, this is magnified when women entrepreneurs across our ecosystem face challenges with access to proper training, technical advisory, and financial support. Only 17% of equity financing and 2% of venture debt facilities went to female founders in 2023. Few founders have raised equity, and only 2% of VC dollars goes to investing in female founders in Africa. Despite lower debt non-performance rates, women face a $42 billion gender financing gap.

Women require more patient capital, flexible financing, and tailored support in the face of the economic challenges they fight in the African economy. Supporting women entrepreneurs to become job creators and providing demand-driven finance to help their businesses grow as part of our solution becomes critical. Our programmes are designed for entrepreneurial development with access to capital through demand driven financing based on alternative credit scoring leveraging social scoring and technology. As part of our solution initiatives for entrepreneurial development, we will provide technical support for founders through a hyper-economic accelerator, supporting entrepreneurs with technical business services, providing sustainability training, and overlaying ESG targets within their businesses. To provide founders with access to capital, we are building a pool of flexible, demand-based capital to support our founders. This capital includes opportunities to derisk other investors' capital, be utilized to pass due diligence and leverage capital to support other capital providers coming into the deals. We are building a pool of capital providers to support entrepreneurs with additional debt, equity, revenue-based finance, and other innovative capital requirements. Once finance is received, the founders are then placed on a post-accelerator, which provides additional support to manage capital better and support business growth and development with technical experts and business coaches. 

Our target population is African female founders. Across Africa, they are underserved in financial access to grow their businesses despite being a significant contributor toward GDP on the continent. Some of the challenges include access to the right credit based on poor or non-existent credit scoring limiting financing options.  In addition, they face incredible challenges where they are exposed to gender-based violence daily and face significant challenges that arise as part of the gender parity they face. The solution will ensure that these women are supported and are able to grow their businesses. Our support system also includes a female-focus and designed co-working spaces to assist with the high infrastructure costs, pipeline sourcing, an incubator programme, further learning, and development, and finally an investment readiness piece to invest directly in women entrepreneurs. The solution not only works in supporting entrepreneurs but also developing a new credit rating system based on social participation and leveraging technology to develop new risk profiles. This support is impactful in that women founders finally get the help they require to see their businesses thrive and contribute to the economy more positively. 

Over the past two decades, WomHub, through its foundation WomEng has built ecosystems. Our founders are engineers turned entrepreneurs turned investors who understand the market needs, opportunities, and how best to provide support when generating new economic opportunities. Our team consists of in-house technical experts with industry experience who are well-positioned to serve African entrepreneurs. Their unique understanding of the challenges African women entrepreneurs face positions them uniquely in sharing strategies and supporting founders to tackle the industrious economic problems that persist.  Through our partners, we have served over 300 entrepreneurs in the last year and are the experts in digital emersion. Our spaces spread throughout South Africa in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and East London, serve as homes where entrepreneurs can innovate, network and make use of the latest Meraki hardware and software - a first on the African continent. 

Our beneficiaries, consisting of 130,000 women and girls globally, have been the custodians of the programmes we have built for our talent development and entrepreneurship streams. We have built several incubator and accelerator programmes for our entrepreneurship stream. Serving entrepreneurs worldwide, our programmes focus on business diagnostics, development assistance, business mentors, investor readiness, venture clinics, and funding support to help female founders grow their businesses. Our thematic incubators and accelerators generate high impact to create jobs and diversify supply chains. 

Our talent stream develops pipelines, innovation, and employability programmes for women and girls in STEM to curate a workforce for the future. In addition, we have built curriculums geared toward building awareness since 2006 for STEM fields and engineering, in particular, to demonstrate to and encourage the girlchild that they too can become the world’s greatest problem-solvers despite engineering fields being heavily male-dominated. As part of talent development, we have tech modules including cybersecurity, coding, robotics, and sustainable development for women and girls who are early-stage and early adopters to drive digital inclusion. All of this forms the backdrop of building out the social scoring system for loans looking at programme participation and developing risk profiles. We currently have all the training modules in place and are now working on the tech and the financing piece

The funding gap for women entrepreneurs on the African continent is gross, despite contributing $1.55 trillion to Africa’s GDP. We hope to challenge the financial barriers they face through entrepreneurial development with a direct pipeline to access capital that suits the needs of women, rather than leaving them underbanked and undervalued for their economic contributions. We are looking to not only raise capital but to build a pool of flexible, demand-based capital to support our founders. The capital includes support for entrepreneurs who are demand-driven financing to leverage tech to create better social rating scores. With this, we are working to attract a group of financiers looking to invest in women’s economic prosperity. This will look at how to look at deals differently while focusing on female founders with a commercial return. Some of the support is around accessing financiers, people looking at alternative investment vehicles and looking at communications and better story telling.

Our solution is built on over 20 years of working to build the entire ecosystem for women in STEM. What makes us unique is the ecosystem approach that looks at holistically supporting female entrepreneurs looking at building their technical skills and business skills while building up a risk and social scorecard as an indicator for alternative scoring for capital allocation. Once we have these in place, the training and scoring, we are leveraging technology to help entrepreneurs determine the type of financing and terms they are looking for, and then help them curate a boutique financing deal to meet their criteria. Once the deal is approved and concluded, there is post investment support to help the entrepreneurs leverage the capital for success. . 

Our initiative aims to empower entrepreneurs to establish thriving businesses, fostering job creation and positive social and environmental impacts within their communities. By providing targeted support and resources, we expect to see several key outcomes. In the short term, young entrepreneurs will identify strengths, weakness, and market needs, developing comprehensive plans to address any gaps. This will be facilitated through access to quality training in business and personal development, along with support networks and financial resources necessary for business growth. As a results, we anticipate that businesses will demonstrate improved performance, with entrepreneurs making progress against their business growth plans and showing enhanced confidence in pursuing their personal goals. 

In the longer term, our goal is to see these businesses thriving and generating decent jobs within their communities. By equipping entrepreneurs with the skills, networks, and financial resources they need to succeed, we believe they will be better positioned to create sustainable employment opportunities. This, in turn, will contribute to wider positive social and environmental impacts, driving economic growth and prosperity at the grassroots level.

To achieve these outcomes, we focus on several key inputs, including access to skills, networks, and finance. Through market analysis, entrepreneurs receive tailored training and support covering essential business development and personal entrepreneurial skills. Additionally, they gain access to enabling support systems, mentorship, peer networks, and financial literacy training. Awareness of and access to appropriate funding options are also provided, ensuring entrepreneurs have the necessary resources to fuel their business growth. 

Throughout our initiative, we emphasize themes such as gender inclusion, financial health, confidence building and job creation. By disaggregating core metrics and prioritizing these areas, we ensure that our support is targeted and effective, addressing the unique needs and challenges faced by women entrepreneurs and underserved communities, Through this comprehensive approach, we expect to see tangible and sustainable impacts, empowering entrepreneurs to drive positive change and economic growth within their communities. 

WomHub uses data analytics to support our programmes better. Data collection is continuous throughout the programme using spot surveys, detailed feedback both anonymous and one-on-one. All this data and information is collected and provided in insight reports as deliverables for the project. Along with the data captured during the programme that will feed into the adjustment of the programme, we will be using the following key metrics for success, understanding that the entrepreneurs are at various stages of their journey and some of the metrics have longer term required to measure success:

• Programme rating by participants

• Potential revenue and sales

• Potential funding opportunities

• Stability of the business

• Number of jobs potentially being created

• Impact on development objectives

• Partnerships and collaborations

• Personal development and improved leadership traits

Project Objective: To increase the number of women in the tech economy indicated by the number of female founders trained and verified through survey data. The risks and assumptions associated are that there will be a 90% completion rate of training and that all the women trained will successfully use tech to contribute toward economic growth.

Results: 30 female entrepreneurs indicated by the number of attendees through verifying the survey on attendees. 

Activities/measures: The activities measured are the incubator/accelerator programmes and the investment readiness programme indicated through course feedback, certificates, and entrepreneur’s ability to attract investment and raising capital. The means of verifications will be through survey data and the risks/assumptions associated with this is a 90% course satisfaction rate and female founders being able to raise capital post programme. 

The core technology powering our solution is artificial intelligence. We are using artificial intelligence to build social scorecards in an effort to better credit and scoring through building data for entrepreneurs to build better scorecards for investments and building intelligence to help entrepreneurs make decisions around their financing needs. This will create greater positivity for women and encourage banks to look at datasets differently. This looks at the types of capital being dispersed based on demand and not supply, and have the ability to track profitability. This solves world problems through creating better social scorecards based on incubator/accelerator programme performance and does not rely on a track record of purchasing or collateral. 

As part of our service offering, we are providing entrepreneurs with access to our tech opportunity labs where founders can showcase their products to customers in real-time on the latest technology. This includes VR Solutions, FinTech solutions, business processing solutions, and gaming.

Our team at WomHub consists of 27 full-time employees while on our solutions team full-time we have Naadiya Moosajee - Team Lead for this programme, Anjani Harjeven - Group CEO, and Aysha Tegally - Head of Capital who work in tandem  to action our solutions and generate a significant ecosystem impact. 

For 20 years, we have been building an ecosystem for women in STEM and has dedicated the last 2 years to focus on our financial solution and creating an impact with demand-driven finance while encouraging investors and financials institutions to think differently about investing.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is not only reflected in our mission but also embedded into the fabric of our organization. We recognize the vital importance of fostering a diverse and inclusive team to drive innovation and revolutionize the STEM industry. Our leadership team is comprised of women and people of color, reflecting our dedication to amplifying underrepresented voices and perspectives within our organization.

In addition to the diversity of our leadership team, our entire staff comes from a wide range of cultural and background experiences. We believe that this diversity enriches our team's collective knowledge and creativity, fostering a dynamic and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their unique talents and perspectives.

To ensure that our team minimizes barriers to opportunity and provides a welcoming environment for all team members, we have implemented several key initiatives:

• Diverse Hiring Practices: We prioritize diversity and inclusion in our recruitment processes, actively seeking out candidates from underrepresented backgrounds and providing equal opportunities for all applicants. We recognize the importance of representation at all levels of our organization and strive to create pathways for career advancement for individuals from marginalized communities.

• Equitable Policies and Practices: We have established equitable policies and practices to ensure fair treatment and access to opportunities for all staff members. This includes policies related to hiring, promotion, compensation, and professional development, which are designed to address disparities and eliminate systemic barriers that may prevent the full participation of marginalized groups.

• Inclusive Work Culture: We foster an inclusive work culture where all team members are welcomed, respected, supported, and valued. This includes promoting open communication, actively listening to diverse perspectives, and providing opportunities for collaboration and teamwork across departments and levels of seniority.

Through these initiatives and practices, we are committed to creating a workplace where diversity is celebrated, equity is prioritized, and inclusion is woven into the fabric of our organizational culture. We believe that by fostering a diverse and inclusive team, we can drive innovation, foster creativity, and ultimately achieve our mission of revolutionizing the STEM industry for the betterment of all.

Our business model revolves around serving women and girls in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by providing comprehensive support and resources at every stage of their entrepreneurial journey. Our underlying mission is to empower women and girls to succeed in STEM fields, from attraction to ownership, investment, and beyond. We recognize the immense potential of women and girls in driving innovation and growth in STEM sectors, and our business model is designed to unlock this potential and create lasting impact. Typically our end beneficiary does not pay, but we work with corporates who are looking to diversify their supply chains and access to diverse talent. They pay us to run these programmes. 

Key components of our business model include:

• Attraction: We attract women and girls to STEM fields by offering engaging and accessible programs, workshops, and events designed to spark interest and curiosity in science and technology. Through hands-on activities, mentorship opportunities, and exposure to role models, we inspire and encourage women and girls to pursue careers in STEM.

• Ownership: We support women entrepreneurs in STEM by providing them with the tools, resources, and networks they need to establish and grow their businesses. This includes access to training, mentorship, funding opportunities, and support services tailored to the unique needs of women entrepreneurs. By empowering women to become business owners and leaders in STEM sectors, we aim to increase diversity and representation within the industry.

• Investment: We facilitate access to capital for women entrepreneurs in STEM by connecting them with investors, venture capitalists, and funding opportunities. We also provide assistance with investment readiness, helping women entrepreneurs prepare and present their business plans to attract investment. By bridging the finance gap and increasing access to funding, we enable women entrepreneurs to scale their businesses and drive innovation in STEM sectors.

• Exit: We support women entrepreneurs in navigating exit strategies and opportunities, whether through mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, or other means of business transition. Our goal is to ensure that women entrepreneurs have the knowledge and resources they need to make informed decisions about the future of their businesses and to maximize value for themselves and their stakeholders.

Throughout every stage of the entrepreneurial journey, our business model is driven by our commitment to serving women and girls in STEM. We provide value to our customers and beneficiaries by offering tailored support and resources that address their unique needs and challenges. Whether it's through training and mentorship, access to funding, or assistance with business transition, we empower women and girls to succeed and thrive in STEM fields, creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive future for all.

WomHub has fostered several partnerships with multi-year contracts, ensuring that our future is secure and sustainable. One of these partnerships is with 2X Global for their Climate Gender Equity Fund where we were provided with funding to build a pool of money to flexible finance for entrepreneurs and another to facilitate and investment readiness programme. Other partners include Winrock International, an affiliate of the US Government, under a project titled Accelerating Women’s Economic Empowerment to create a module around sustainability and climate to further educate entrepreneurs, not only about finance, but on sustainability and touching on the green economy piece. We work with big engineering companies across our region including De Beers, Sasol, Visa Foundation to support our entrepreneur development programmes.