Grace Ashiru
Meg Whitman, the US ambassador to Kenya, is one of the confirmed speakers for the Africa Tech Female Founder Summit, which will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, next month. TLcom Capital, an Africa-focused venture capital firm, is hosting the summit.
A fireside conversation with Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay and Hewlett-Packard, is planned during the introductory session, which is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, November 9th. She will talk about her experience scaling technology enterprises around the world.
The 2022 Africa Tech Female Founder Summit will have the theme “Dare to do: the scale mindset,” and experts will talk about how to grow tech businesses. It will build on TLcom’s work to create a strong community of African female tech founders who can learn from and help each other.
Odunayo Eweniyi, co-founder and COO of Piggyvest, will give the keynote speech at the event. She will discuss how she built Africa’s most prominent wealth tech company. This will be followed by a panel discussion on how to use operations, people, and money to grow sustainably.
Rose Goslinga, who works for Pula, a leader in insurance technology, will also give a masterclass on OKRs. At the summit, Adia Sowho of MTN Nigeria, Radhika Bachu of Ndovu, and Tebogo Mokwena of Akiba Digital, among others, will be among the female C-suite executives and founders of Africa’s top tech companies.
This year, the summit will be held in person, and TLcom is now accepting applications from women tech entrepreneurs in Africa and the diaspora to attend.”
Omobola Johnson, a senior partner at TLcom Capital, says, “This year’s summit will tackle head-on some of the challenges female founders face while moving the conversation on to actionable strategies for scaling their businesses.”
The prospect of scaling can be daunting for female entrepreneurs due to the obstacles that arise, severely limiting their business growth. To combat this, we actively challenge our attendees to be bolder and more ambitious.
Given the increasing number of female-led, tech-enabled businesses on the continent with enormous economic potential, it’s time to break this cycle. With the proper strategic support, we are confident that this emerging class of female-led start-ups can eventually challenge the status quo and become Africa’s next generation of unicorns.”
In the past, more than 150 women who are tech entrepreneurs attended the summit. Last year, the event was held online, and Julia Gillard, the former prime minister of Australia and chairperson of Andela, gave the keynote speech. Andreata Muforo, a partner at TLcom Capital, says, “As the Female Founder Summit approaches its fourth year, we’ve been lucky to see the number of founders in our community grow. We need to organize our resources to help them make the most of the next step in their growth as business owners.
For many of these entrepreneurs, this is their first foray into a critical growth phase, and our goal is to arm them with a playbook from each other and seasoned business leaders who have been on this journey before, so they can become the next crop of African founders generating massive value for the continent.”
The $150 million TIDE Africa Fund II from TLcom is one of the most active funds in Africa. Eloho Omame was just hired as a partner in June 2022, making the leadership team 60% women. The company has done a lot to help women founders, including holding an annual summit and investing in some of Africa’s best women-led start-ups like Okra and Pula.
At the beginning of this year, TLcom also increased its efforts to close the severe funding gap for Africa’s women techpreneurs by making a co-investment commitment of $2 million to support the launch of FirstCheck Africa’s debut $10 million fund.
