Female entrepreneurs receive just a fraction of the available capital in private markets, and in Africa, the gap is especially stark. In 2024, female founders on the continent secured only 2% of total venture funding, the lowest level since 2019. Women-led startups raised just $48 million, while their male counterparts raised nearly $2.2 billion during the same period. This discrepancy exists despite mounting evidence that female-led businesses are not only viable, but they also often outperform. According to McKinsey, closing gender gaps in Africa’s workforce could add $316 billion to the continent’s GDP by 2025.

Paid and unpaid care and domestic work are vital to both the economy and society; yet they remain invisible, undervalued and under-rewarded, and unevenly distributed. In the first of a series of blogs, Rebecca Calder, Emily Boost and Aurelie Faugier at Kore Global present a framework to help define investable care economy opportunities as part of their ecosystem mapping work.

Andia Chakava is the Investment Director at the Graca Machel Trust, a Pan African organisation that deals with women's and children's rights through a gender lens investment vehicle and other programmes. We spoke to her about regional gender and JEDI nuances on the continent, the importance of working with local women’s networks, and the Trust’s participatory investment processes.

Investors often gravitate toward opportunities in technology, energy and financial services as the best way to deploy their $1 billion impact funds. The result, says Laura Callanan, is that impact investors are missing the large swath of the global economy where women, youth, indigenous peoples, and others can be found: the creative economy.