By Evalyne Ndirangu
(This piece was crossposted and originally intended for ‘The Gender Lens Brief’ newsletter run by Carolyne Kirabo)
I hesitate to start by repeating the well-worn statistic that Africa has the highest female entrepreneurial activity globally, but I need to in order to demonstrate why while these numbers are impressive, they’re also hiding something.
African women are directionally constrained. What I mean is that while they have a massive entrepreneurial energy, it has been channelled into a narrow corridor of sectors. And with grim irony, the sectors it has been channelled away from are the very ones that will determine whether Africa’s economic transformation succeeds.
This is an attempt to map that geography, understand where women are building, where they are largely absent, what the investment field looks like, and what it would take to turn things around.
The sectors that women inhabit
Before examining the barriers, we must first grasp the pattern. Globally, the ILO’s data on where women work shows that they’re concentrated in healthcare and care services, education, consumer services, and retail, and least present in oil, gas and mining, infrastructure and manufacturing.
In Africa, this pattern holds – an African Private Capital Association (AVCA) report, that mapped 200+ investors and nearly 2,000 portfolio companies shows that female-founded and led companies are concentrated in consumer goods and services, and hospitality and leisure.
These sectors represent doors that are ajar for women and thus easier to break into due to their lower capital barriers to entry (compared to capital-heavy ones like manufacturing), more flexible operating models (often accommodating women’s dual roles in society), a closer alignment with gendered consumption patterns, and ones where women already hold domain expertise from informal economic participation.
None of this means the women in these sectors are doing small or unimportant work, as highlighted by a 2025 UNDP report (p7) showing that some of these areas are amongst the most commercially viable and SDG aligned.
The sectors keeping women out
Manufacturing and industrial production
Manufacturing and industry is, in the language of economists, a “hard sector.” It requires fixed capital, equipment, land, technical skills, and navigating regulatory regimes that are often not designed with small-scale producers in mind. It is, however, also the sector that many development economists identify as central to economic transformation. Earlier this year in fact, the World Bank revised its long-held stance that ‘industrial policy is usually a costly failure’, now advising that it ought to be a key consideration in national policy toolkits.
It is therefore disheartening that in Africa women account for less than a third of the manufacturing workforce, with this figure worse at ownership and leadership levels.
In Kenya, even as more women venture into the sector, a 2023 study by Kenyatta University (KU) (p1) noted that only 17% of women are formally employed in manufacturing, and the majority are confined to lower-paying jobs like cleaners and receptionists. And when they are entrepreneurs, they generally own smaller shares of high-value enterprises, many operating as micro, small and medium enterprises in the informal sector.
Further, even within the manufacturing sector, many tend to cater to consumer goods driven by lower machinery requirements, more accessible raw material sourcing and a clear market in the domestic consumer economy.
(The distribution of women-led and owned businesses in the manufacturing sector shows a skew towards consumer sectors such as food and beverages.)
Further, even within the manufacturing sector, many tend to cater to consumer goods driven by lower machinery requirements, more accessible raw material sourcing and a clear market in the domestic consumer economy.
Investment wise, the picture isn’t much better. The aforementioned AVCA report found that industrial goods sectors, alongside telecoms and energy/environment, collectively represent nearly a quarter of all private capital portfolio companies in Africa, but host less than 5% of female founders and only 9% of female CEOs. Within industrial goods specifically, male founded companies accounted for 11% of the portfolio, while women-led ones made up an abysmal 1%.
Hence, the capital that would allow a woman-owned manufacturing enterprise to move from cottage to factory scale simply does not flow in her direction at the rate that would change the picture.
Energy: a sector that needs women most and invests in them least
The irony in the energy sector is that African women are the primary managers of household energy as well as those who most acutely feel the consequences of its poverty, however, they also lead less than 20% of renewable energy businesses in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda according to a 2025 AfDB and CIF report. And continent-wide, a 2024 annual review on renewable energy and jobs (p33) found that African women made up 38% of Africa’s solar PV industry and another report noted they (alongside women from Asia Pacific) made up 33% of the renewable energy workforce (p13).
(Globally, women hold 32% of the overall renewables workforce, making up 45% of administrative roles but only 19% of senior management positions. Source: IRENA – Renewable energy and jobs: Annual review 2025. (p66))
In financing, in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, women entrepreneurs in the renewable energy sector access only 7% of available commercial capital. And in the African clean energy sector, women-led companies secure less than 10% of available venture financing (p123). Even worse, despite contributing to an estimated 80% of clean cooking market development efforts, women entrepreneurs receive less than 1% of global climate finance related to clean cooking access (p123).
What drives this?
These sectors are capital-heavy, requiring upfront investment in equipment and installation that demands access to commercial credit or equity that women struggle to obtain.
Societal and cultural norms – these sectors have long been coded as “men’s work.” The KU study (p59) while evaluating Kenya Association of Manufacturers Women in Manufacturing program found that even programme participation with all its networking and mentorship could not override the household-level dynamics that constrain women’s business decisions. Married women still largely had to consult their spouses before accessing common household economic resources or the earnings they generated. This is not a reason to abandon such programmes, but one to build men into them as co-beneficiaries and change agents.
Poor policy is another contributor – for example, an evaluation of Kenya’s National Industrialization Policy framework (in operation since 2012 and in review as of March 2026) found the policy “not gender sensitive”, failing to address inequalities such as female underrepresentation in the ownership of high-value enterprises or the financing gap that pushes women-led manufacturing businesses into informal micro-scale operations (p4). Policy frameworks that do not name the problem cannot solve it.
Investor bias – women-run ventures are frequently perceived as informal, high-risk, or low-margin, and women are also largely excluded from the informal, male-dominated spaces where investment relationships and deal flows are established.
A leaky STEM pipeline which is improving but remains a persistent barrier. A troubling caveat here is that even women with the technical qualifications barely get their foot in the door. A report by BSR (admittedly from 2017) found that even technically qualified women were frequently assigned non-technical roles like marketing (p17), indicating a placement and culture problem where the sector is organised around a gendered assumption about who belongs where – an assumption that persists even when credentials challenge it. It’s also worth noting that even as women pursue STEM, there’s a persistent drop-off as they transition from STEM classrooms into the workforce.
(In the African tech sector for example, female representation drops from 47% female STEM graduates to 23%-30% when those graduates enter the tech workforce, and to less than 12% in tech leadership for instance. Source: McKinsey)
To channel women into these sectors and funds to them, several solutions are required:
Intentional Gender-Lens Investing (GLI): Firms that set explicit, measurable gender diversity targets for their portfolios deploy more capital to women and see better financial returns.
Diverse Investment Committees (ICs) – changing who writes the cheques changes who gets funded. AVCA’s data shows that firms with majority-female investment committees back women-led companies at nearly six times the rate of male-dominated firms – 48% vs 8%. However, the report shows that even male dominated firms who set gender lens investing targets increased the share of female-led companies in their portfolios by 13 percentage points – reiterating point 1 above.
Developing tailored financial instruments: I’m talking about specialised products like Renewable Energy Gender Bonds, impact-linked working capital, and interest-free, milestone-based debt that incentivise financial institutions to lend to women.
Addressing the STEM pipeline – increasing girls’ access to STEM will help women better navigate the industry. However, the bridge between education and work must be strengthened to ensure education translates into meaningful options for women. Notably, we must go further than HR initiatives to address what is a cultural problem. Holistic strategies inclusive of leadership commitment, aspirational targets with accountability mechanisms, and a cultural transformation that questions the gendered assumptions embedded in role allocation and career progression are non-negotiable.
Enacting gender-responsive policies and procurement: Governments ought to establish and enforce workplace protections such as family-friendly policies and introduce gender-responsive procurement, like mandating that a specific percentage of public energy contracts be reserved for women-led enterprises to guarantee market access.
In conclusion
The UNDP’s comprehensive mapping of 250 SDG-aligned investment opportunities across 20 African countries finds that some of the most commercially attractive are concentrated precisely in the sectors where women are underrepresented – food and beverage (32%), infrastructure (22%), renewable resources and alternative energy (11%), healthcare (10%), etc. The question for all of us is whether the evidence is treated as a call to action or if it continues to be managed as a conversation about fairness.