Despite The Barriers, Lack Of Investment, And Unconscious Bias – Female Tech Founders In Nigeria Are Making Waves
According to government figures, Nigeria has been recording massive growth in its information technology sector, but only one-fifth of IT workers are women.
Now aid groups are trying to help women and girls enter the IT world by teaching them about blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.
And despite the lack of gender diversity on investment boards in the country, the funding gap, or even an unconscious bias that has frequently been reported – many female African tech entrepreneurs continue to impact the industry remarkably.
For example, a report by The Women in Tech Africa Summit 2019 showed that despite receiving 50% less venture capital funding, global technology firms led by female entrepreneurs typically achieve a 35% higher return on investment than those managed by men.
Here we’ve listed four Nigerian female tech leaders killing it in the industry.
Odunayo Eweniyi
The co-founder and COO of Piggyvest, a secure online savings platform that makes saving possible by combining discipline plus flexibility to make you grow your savings.
PiggyVest is the first online “Savings & Investment” app in West Africa. It first launched as “Piggybank. ng” on the 7th of January 2016 as a savings-only platform.
For three years, it offered only savings to our users. Then in April of 2019, it rebranded to “PiggyVest” and began offering direct investment opportunities to users in addition to savings.
She is also the founder of FirstCheck Africa, a female-led, female-focused angel fund and investor community, and the co-founder of PushCV, a platform that connects top employers to recruiters.
Maya HorganFamodu
Maya HorganFamodu is a venture capital investor, founder, and partner at Ingressive Capital, a $10million venture fund focused on early-stage African tech and provides market entry, technology research, and market operations services for firms and businesses expanding into Africa.
Ingressive has backed companies like Bamboo, which gives Africans unrestricted access to invest in global capital markets. It has also funded Paystack; 54gene, the first African genomics research, services, and development company;
She also co-founded Ingressive for Good, a non-profit initiative that provides micro-scholarships, technical skills training, and talent placement.
Fara Ashiru Jituboh
She’s the co-founder and CEO of Okra. Fara and her partner, David Peterside, founded the company in June 2019.
In 2020, Fara Ashiru Jituboh raised a $1M pre-seed round for Okra, a Nigeria-based’ super-connector that allows the secure exchange of real-time financial information between customers, applications, and banks.
In April 2021, the fintech firm again announced closing a seed round of $3.5 million to expand its data infrastructure across Nigeria.
Yanmo Omoregbe
Yanmo is a co-founder and the director of growth at Bamboo, a digital investment platform that curates stock-exchange traded stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), American depositary receipts (ADRs), and represents one of the newer generation of startups keen on helping Nigerians build wealth.
As a Y Combinator company, the company raised a seed round of $1.5 million, indicating growth in profitability and adoption of the platform with thousands of registered users. So far, it has processed trades for over 30,000 people
