How African Tech Vision is opening doors for African Female Founders through their virtual mentorship program
The African Tech Vision 10 week virtual mentorship program for female African entrepreneurs has come to an end but the journey for the founders who have undergone a rigorous learning and mentoring experience will continue long after. This year, 26 startups from 11 countries were finally selected out of over 1000 companies which had been reviewed. The program has increased twofold with almost double the number of mentors, all 70 of them providing unparalleled knowledge and insight within the tech start-up scene.
The well-known likes of Kenneth Kinyanjui and Victor Asemota, who are pioneers in the tech startup and investor scene in Africa and who also invest financially and socially into the upliftment of the entrepreneurial landscape in Africa, brought incredible insight as mentors. For the mentees, understanding the complexities of scaling up in Africa and identifying product market-fit was particularly important for their growth.
‘African Tech Vision has been an incredibly rewarding mentorship programme for two reasons: the diversity of impactful founders assembled for our cohort as well as the dedication and capacity of the mentors and programme managers brought together to create a real community for each of us’ said Kristin Wilson, founder of Sync, a platform that enables African MSMEs to leverage technology to drive growth and scale.‘
The program is robust in the sense that it taps into the topics that are continually being disregarded from a female entrepreneur's perspective. That being, tapping into markets specifically in tech that is predominantly male dominated in Africa, securing business capital and lastly being exposed to the kind of networks that could propel these founders into breaking that glass ceiling.
The ATV program has equipped me and my fellow founders with the necessary skills to grow our business and to build our leadership capacity by drawing upon the experience and expertise of top-notch industry experts, say Doreen Irungu the founder of Ustawi Africa, an afritech social enterprise business that is empowering small scale, female farmers.
Doreen, who is from Kenya has recently been invited as a speaker to the Katapult Future Fest conference in Oslo, Norway to speak on the topic of amplifying the voices of rural women in Africa and to pitch an innovative tech idea that she and her team have been working on. This speaking opportunity was made possible because of the vast connections African Tech Vision has within the international investor community.
The calibre of the African Tech Vision program lies in the fact that the quality of each workshop and mentoring session is driven by dedicated experts who address critical needs that the founders face from ‘How to pitch to investors’ to selected lectures around leadership and mental health. Every founder that goes through the program will have continued access to their mentor and their businesses positioned within a broader investor community.
Founders from the first program in 2021 continue to thrive and grow. One of them is Daisy Isaiho, co-founder of Zuri Health, who joined the African Tech Vision inaugural program in 2021. Her company just raised $1.3m in pre-seed funding to scale their digital health business across Africa.
“Seeing the female founders thrive beyond our program fills us with pride and happiness. There are so many talented female founders on the continent. Given equal opportunities, they are well equipped to build meaningful businesses. Nurturing the next generation of female entrepreneurs and changemakers is exactly what the African Tech Vision is all about says Sohaila Ouffata founder of ATV.”
