By Evalyne Ndirangu
September 24th, 2025, marked a significant milestone for M-Kyala Ventures: five years of relentlessly transforming the landscape for African women entrepreneurs. What began amidst the uncertainty of a global pandemic, has blossomed into a powerful movement, empowering over 15,000 women across 12 countries, deploying more than $1 million in catalytic investments, and reshaping how over 30 organisations champion female-led businesses.
A pandemic’s pause, a founder’s purpose
In 2020, our founder Carolyne Kirabo was on sabbatical, having earned herself a break after over 15 years in East Africa’s finance space. Her plan was to rest and reset, but then, the pandemic happened, putting the world on pause.
As the weeks of lockdown stretched into months, Carolyne’s thoughts were plagued by a contradiction she had grappled with her entire career: despite women entrepreneurs being resilient, disciplined, and likelier to use capital more efficiently than their male counterparts, they remained the most excluded from accessing it.
Throughout her career, she had been repeatedly asked to “make the case for women” as entrepreneurs. The absurdity, however, was that the case had already been made.
Early in her career, while on a World Bank assignment evaluating businesses in Uganda, Carolyne noticed that of 20 businesses assessed, only three were women-owned. Yet, those three stood out as the only ones that had used loans exactly as intended, hired CFOs, secured insurance and communicated proactively with lenders. This pattern would repeat throughout her career. When she worked to attract women entrepreneurs into portfolio companies, investors would almost always want a justification for why women deserved capital, rather than question why they weren’t already receiving it. Facing a choice to either return to another organisation and fight the same battles, or build something different, Carolyne chose the latter, marking the birth of M-Kyala Ventures.
From advisory to active investment
Since inception, we have been driven by a singular mission: to create an ecosystem that fairly represents women at all levels of the entrepreneurial value chain.
Initially, we began as an advisory firm, helping organisations to develop robust strategies to support women entrepreneurs, however, three years in, a crucial realisation emerged: advisory services alone, while valuable, were insufficient.
“We saw that if we wanted women to access capital, we needed to deploy it ourselves,” Carolyne explains. “Organisations could have the best strategies, but if capital doesn’t flow, women entrepreneurs remain constrained at critical growth stages.”
This catalysed the creation of M-Kyala Capital, a fund designed to deploy catalytic early-stage capital to women led businesses across East Africa, marking our pivotal evolution into active investors.
Impact in action: stories of transformation
Our transformative impact is most evident in the growth of the entrepreneurs we have supported.
(Photo credit: Uzuri K&Y)
Hellen Munyasa, for instance, co-founded Helton Traders upon discovering that Uganda’s plastic waste problem could solve the disruptive import delays plaguing her textile business. Helton has now recycled over 1,200 tonnes of plastic waste (millions of discarded plastic bottles), turning them into thread, while paying waste collectors nearly three times the market rate. “M-Kyala’s support has allowed us to keep building a business that is not only viable but also deeply rooted in community impact.” Hellen reflects.
In Kenya, Starlin Farah and Adan Mohammed’s Ecodudu harnesses black soldier flies to transform organic waste into animal feed and fertiliser, processing thousands of tonnes of waste that would otherwise end up in landfills polluting the environment, preventing CO2 emissions, whilst training over 2,500 farmers in sustainable farming practices.
Kevine Kagirimpundu at Rwanda’s Uzuri K&Y is transforming discarded car tyres into sustainable and fashionable footwear, and has embedded technical and entrepreneurial skills training into Uzuri’s model, turning a labour shortage into an advantage and creating formal employment opportunities for women and youth.
“Carolyne is already an advisor in terms of how we do business,” she notes, a relationship that accelerated revenue growth by 15% after M-Kyala’s investment.
Meanwhile, Njeri Rono’s journey with Kenya’s Tawi Naturals exemplifies the resilience of many women entrepreneurs and the impact of flexible capital. When COVID-19 threatened to derail her condiment business just as it was scaling, M-Kyala’s timely support enabled the founder to stabilise supply chains, regain retail traction, expand distribution to major retailers and increase female employment five-fold.
These stories share a common thread, women building circular economy solutions, creating dignified employment, and generating both financial returns and community impact.
Beyond capital: the multiplier effect
Our impact, however, extends beyond direct investments. Through strategic advisory work with over 30 organisations, M-Kyala has helped reshape how accelerators design programmes for women entrepreneurs, how financial institutions create products that serve women, and how investors evaluate opportunities.
For instance, our Gender Smart Lending Toolkit, developed with support from USAID and ANDE, provides practical frameworks for financial institutions to serve women entrepreneurs better. Furthermore, our research on the pivotal role of women in agroecology is actively shaping climate-smart agriculture investments, while our advocacy for women’s access to climate financing has channeled $200,000 into women-led enterprises within climate and sustainability sectors, coupled with crucial technical assistance.
“Our goal with clients is not for them to simply increase the sheer number of women served,” Carolyne emphasises, “but to deliver very high value to women entrepreneurs that can be turned into growth strategies they can action to see their businesses succeed.”
This dual approach, marrying advisory with capital deployment, forges systemic change. Crucially, it accumulates irrefutable evidence that gender-lens investing yields both financial returns and profound social impact.
Read more about our work and impact in our 5-year Impact Report.
What five years have taught us
Our journey has reinforced the core truth that women entrepreneurs require neither special treatment, nor lack the capability, but rather, they lack access and require systems designed with their realities in mind.
There are, however, deeply entrenched barriers that still limit women entrepreneurs including rigid collateral requirements, cultural biases, among other systemic obstacles. Changing them requires patience, strategic partnerships, and capital deployed with both conviction and flexibility. It also requires working at multiple levels simultaneously, with entrepreneurs, ecosystem organisations, financial institutions and policymakers.
The road ahead
We have an audacious but grounded goal to reach 1 million women and girls by 2030 with the skills and resources they need to thrive as entrepreneurs, and mobilize upwards of $100 million in investments targeted at women entrepreneurs by 2035.
Achieving these goals calls for partners who will fund, design and scale solutions with the same pragmatism and patience that produced the early wins.
“It’s going to take over a hundred years to realize gender equality at the current pace,” Carolyne notes, “what that means is we need to do big things now that start to close this gap very quickly.”
Join us and become a catalyst for this essential change.