Investing in Women is an Economic Imperative (Tokunboh Ishmael, Andreata Muforo)

The Flip

Despite research showing that female founders outperform their male peers, startups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding in Africa last year. There is a huge gender funding gap. How do we close it?

This episode is the third of a five-episode series on gender lens investing, co-hosted by Eloho Omame, Founding Partner of First Check Africa, an early-stage fund backing female-led startups. Each episode of this series will explore a different level of the fundraising value chain.

In this episode, we're joined by the investors. Tokunboh Ishmael is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Alithea Capital, a $100 million gender lens private equity fund. Andreata Muforo is a Partner at TLcom Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund with a 60% female partnership.

00:00 - Investing in women is an economic imperative

02:12 - Introducing Tokunboh

04:04 - An Alitheia-led thesis

05:36 - What does gender-lens investing look like in practice?

11:49 - What about the financial returns?

13:35 - Impact targets

17:24 - Are there enough women founders in the pipeline?

19:54 - Women are over-mentored and under-funded

23:48 - Is a female investor backing a female founder a negative signal?

26:53 - What does success look like?

29:47 - Introducing Andreata

31:15 - Why is a traditional VC fund like TLcom trying so hard to invest in more female founders?

33:03 - How VCs make investment decisions

36:18 - Only 25% of the pipeline has a female co-founder

40:44 - Is there a fundamental mismatch with VC and gender-lens investing?

42:31 - What does success look like? Part two

46:47 - A retrospective conversation with Eloho & Justin

In Episode 1 of this series, we spoke to the founders: Bamboo's Yanmo Omorogbe & Uncover's Sneha Mehta: https://theflip.africa/podcast/why-is-only-2-of-funding-going-to-female-founders

In Episode 2 of this series, we spoke to angel investor Yemi Keri, Co-founder of Rising Tide Africa: https://theflip.africa/podcast/this-angel-investor-is-closing-the-gender-funding-gap

This series is created under the ScaleX project: Co-designing Solutions to close the early stage gender-financing gap in Africa, an initiative of Make-IT in Africa.

Make-IT in Africa promotes entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems across Africa for green and inclusive development. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH implements this project on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

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