Africa has more female tech CEOs than founders and here is why it matters

Africa’s tech ecosystem is producing unexpected contradictions. For example, a new report has indicated a trend: women are increasingly being trusted to lead technology companies as chief executives, yet far fewer are being supported to build their own.

The report, from the African Private Capital Association (AVCA), shows that women are more visible at the top of the organisational ladder than at its foundation. While female-led tech companies account for a larger share of leadership roles, female-founded tech ventures remain comparatively rare. 

The Gender Diversity in African Private Capital report revealed that 9% of all female-founded companies in the dataset operate in tech. While the trend shows a growth trajectory, it highlights a critical opportunity to strengthen support for female tech founders in the ideation and early-stage funding phases. 

Rather than signalling full progress, this dynamic exposes how access to capital, networks, and opportunity continues to shape who gets to create companies and who is later invited to run them.

Source: AVA’s Gender Diversity in African Private Capital report

The AVCA gender diversity report also shows that female-founded companies make up a smaller share of the tech sector than female-led ones. This reversal of the traditional founder-to-CEO ratio highlights the growing role of investor-led recruitment in shaping leadership outcomes.

Read more: 8 industry leaders share strategies for career growth in tech in 2026

What the data reveals

In practice, women are increasingly being brought in to scale and manage companies once they have passed the riskiest stages of growth. However, the same openness does not extend as strongly to ideation, company formation, or early-stage funding phases, where founders typically face the highest barriers.

The pattern becomes more pronounced in capital-intensive industries such as Industrial Goods, Telecoms, and Energy & Environment. 

According to the report, women remain largely absent from sectors such as Industrial Goods, Telecoms, and Energy & Environment, which collectively represent nearly a quarter of all portfolio companies but host less than 5% of female founders and only 9% of female CEOs. 

The persistence of gender gaps in these foundational industries that are capital-intensive and highly specialised also aligns with global employment patterns in the industry. These fields have historically been male-dominated, shaped by gender normativity, and workplace cultures that can limit women’s access to networks, entry and advancement opportunities. 

Men lead by an average of 13.6% in these fields across 187 economies benchmarked by the World Bank, although this figure declines to 7.8% in Africa specifically.

This is caused by long-standing structural factors such as technical gatekeeping, limited access to specialised networks, and historically male-dominated work cultures, which continue to narrow the entry points for women.

By contrast, female founders and leaders are more visible in Consumer Goods, Services, and hospitality-related sectors. These industries tend to require less upfront capital, offer more flexible operating models, and align more closely with established consumption patterns, making them more accessible routes into entrepreneurship.

Why female leadership changes who gets hired

Representation at the top does more than shift optics; it changes outcomes inside organisations.

According to the report, the idea that ‘women hire women’ is supported by a growing body of global research. It examined whether that pattern holds in Africa’s private capital-backed companies. 

In Africa, companies with a female founder or CEO employ roughly half women, almost 20 percentage points more than male-led peers and well above the industry average. 

Even partial representation appears to make a difference. Mixed-gender leadership teams are outperforming all-male teams in workforce gender balance, which suggests that inclusion is not binary but cumulative. 

Mixed gender founding teams report 44% female staff, landing squarely between all-female and all-male teams. Conversely, firms led solely by men (whether at the founder or CEO level) hover at approximately 30%, essentially maintaining the status quo rather than improving on it.

This trend aligns with global research indicating that leadership composition significantly influences hiring decisions. When leadership teams lack diversity, they often reproduce themselves. When women are present in decision-making roles, recruitment pipelines tend to widen.

Abi Mustapha-Maduakor, CEO, AVCA

Females’ impact on revenue generation

Beyond workforce composition, female leadership is also linked to commercial performance. The AVCA’s findings indicate that companies founded or led by women report stronger revenue outcomes and faster growth than their male-led counterparts. 

In private capital, performance shapes perception. Revenue growth is one of the clearest signals of commercial traction and an indicator of both value creation and investor returns. 

At the Founder level, women not only report higher revenue, but they also deliver stronger performance. In 2024, companies with female founders posted average revenues of $10.5 million, which is more than double the $4.9 million reported by male-founded peers. 

Their annual growth (+18% YoY) also exceeded that of both male-founded firms (+5% YoY) and the sample average. 

These results align closely with global evidence. Multiple international studies have shown that companies with higher gender diversity at the executive level are more likely to outperform peers financially. 

In Africa’s private capital ecosystem, where returns, scalability, and resilience matter deeply, female leadership is increasingly demonstrating tangible value. The challenge now is to ensure that women are not only hired to lead successful companies, but are equally empowered to create them in the first place.

Read also: How She Leads: Oluwatoyin Aromokeye’s blueprint for growth, security, and product integrity

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