"Investing in African Female Entrepreneurs-The Key to Unlocking Africa’s Potential"

SAP Women in Tech would like to invite you to a Young Africans In Tech session- "Investing in African Female Entrepreneurs: The Key to Unlocking Africa’s Potential" with Pauline Koelbl.

Pauline is AfriProspect GmbH’s Founder/CEO as well as ShEquity’s Founder/Managing Partner, and is a leading innovation expert in developing and emerging economies, an impact investor, and a seasoned impact-driven team leader with over 20 years of experience in international affairs and venture philanthropy. She is also the co-founder of PROWAH (Professional Women of African Heritage) and is currently serving on a variety of boards of companies and organizations connected to business, entrepreneurship, and innovation in Africa. Pauline also has 10+ years of experience in catalyzing innovation and entrepreneurship across Africa and her passion lies in innovation, entrepreneurship, youth, and women's economic empowerment.

What will be discussed in the session?

Africa is super rich, blessed with natural resources and a youthful population, and filled with immense diversity and talent, but many Africans continue to face many challenges linked to poverty. Most of those challenges are being addressed by local innovators and entrepreneurs, and unfortunately many don’t have access to the capital needed to benchmark their solutions, embark on growth, and scale to other markets. Due to the existing biases, access to capital is even harder for African female founders. In 2021, only 0.95% of VC funding for African start-ups went to companies with all women founders or co-founders, compared to 82% for male counterparts.

Join Pauline in this session as she shares more information on why unlocking Africa’s potential requires investing in African female founders. She will be sharing specific examples on how through ShEquity, they are addressing the existing gender funding gap by providing smart investment to impactful African female-led and owned businesses.

The event is open to all.

There will be a Q&A segment in this session so get your questions ready!

Date: April 14, 2022

Time: 15:00-16:00 CEST

Register for the session here!