Speaking during the recent 2022 Forbes
Leading Women Summit, Odunayo Eweniyi, co-panelist who is also the co-founder
of Piggyvest, a digital savings platform stated that there are myths that women
are not building.
Eweniyi insisted that she, as well as so
many other women are building but the problem lies with discovery as a lot of
partners are skewed towards funding the male-led startups in the sector.
She went on to explain that a lot of VCs
have a male-dominated portfolio and they would argue that this is due to a lack
of awareness of female startups in need of funding. Eweniyi however did not
quite agree with this notion as she believes that VCs need to put in the work
to seek out female-owned companies to fund, especially at the early stage.
“Women need that belief capital, same as
men, to be able to take these ideas off the ground,” Eweniyi said. It is
important that female-led startups are able to access funding at the early
stage, as this would help these women founders catch up on their male counterparts
at subsequent seed rounds.
Eweniyi also called for a need to
investigate the biases causing VCs to fund male-led companies over their female
counterparts as data shows that female-led businesses are performing at the
same level as the male-led businesses. “Not giving women funding is simply just
a bad thing because those businesses are not underperforming”, she added.
Also speaking at the summit, Dayo Ademola,
managing director at Branch Nigeria, a leading digital finance app providing a
full suite of financial services such as loan and payment solutions to
individuals, shed light on the large number of women trying to access funding
for their business.
“A large proportion of the loan
applications Branch receives are unsurprisingly from women who need working
capital for their micro businesses,” she revealed
The summit explored the gaps in accessing
funding for female-led business and attempted to raise solutions on what needs
to be done.
Speaking on partnerships, Ademola advised
women who are looking to grow their businesses and careers to find a mentor.
According to Ademola, “You invest in what
looks like you and so we need more women-led angel investors and venture
capitalists. I think that as human beings, we are geared towards emulating what
we see and what we believe to be the pinnacle of achievements.” This would
ensure women businesses get as much capital as needed.
In recent times, there have been a lot of
initiatives for financial inclusion in almost every sector of the Nigerian
economy ranging from small scale farmers to petty traders. Financial inclusion
generally calls for individuals and businesses to have access to useful and
affordable financial products and services that meet their needs, however, not
much has been done about creating access to funding for women-led businesses.
Financial technology is a well-funded field
but not much of it goes to female-founded outfits. This is evident in the
abysmal 3.2 percent funding that was awarded to female-led startups out of the
whopping 3 billion dollars attracted by Nigerian fintechs in the year 2021.
In an attempt to change this anomaly,
Ademola has championed the chart for Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors to
direct more funding towards female-led startups.
As one of the leading finance platforms,
Branch leverages on an innovative outlook, as well as today’s digital solutions
at their disposal, in creating access to a wide range of services for
customers. Indeed, Branch continues to prioritise the provision of real
solutions to meet up with the growing demands of the dynamic financial
environment, for all categories of people, including women.