Women-owned enterprises are essential to Africa’s economic transformation, yet too many operate under conditions where growth happens by chance rather than design. Where support tools exist, they are often based on assumptions that do not reflect how women build and sustain businesses.
While many lead successful, large-scale enterprises, the most persistent barriers tend to surface at the smaller end of the market.
Creating more inclusive financial systems means changing how enterprise is recognised, starting with how early-stage businesses are assessed and extending to how financial pathways support their growth over time. And the scale of these smaller, women-led enterprises across the continent makes this an institutional imperative.
According to the International Finance Corporation, African women have the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity in the world, with nearly one in four starting their own business. They make up more than 40% of SMEs on the continent; yet face a financing gap exceeding $42bn (about R740bn).
That points to a deeper mismatch between how capital frameworks are structured and how enterprise actually works. When lending models rely on narrow definitions of formality and collateral, they consistently undervalue business activity in low-margin sectors and informal environments, where many women entrepreneurs are most active.
At the heart of the challenge is a question of recognition and the risk perceptions that come with it.
Currently, financial systems are largely based on criteria that align more closely with individual wage earners or large corporates than with the realities of small, often informal, women-owned enterprises. These criteria include salaried income, permanent employment records, registered business addresses, and formally held assets, among others.
Enterprise activity that moves through informal trading channels or sits outside standard regulatory visibility is therefore often excluded, not because it lacks substance, but because it lacks the markers that institutions have historically been trained to recognise.
One example is the treatment of unpaid labour. Many women who operate small businesses also manage caregiving responsibilities, such as supporting children or other dependents, alongside their enterprise activity. These roles demand time, planning and the redirection of household income to keep the business going, yet they add nothing to formal credit profiles.
The model cannot accommodate multiplicity. It sees complexity as volatility, rather than resilience
In practice, a woman who runs a spaza shop while raising three children and supporting an extended family is treated as higher risk than a single-income earner with fewer obligations. The model cannot accommodate multiplicity. It sees complexity as volatility, rather than resilience. The economic value of this dual role is effectively erased, leading to the misclassification of potentially viable, multitasking entrepreneurs as unbankable.
This is not at all to say risk management must be abandoned.
Banks have a fundamental duty to safeguard deposits and assess creditworthiness with rigour. Creating more inclusive systems means enabling a broader set of instruments for recognising creditworthiness, with tools that account for economic contribution in all its forms. These can include alternative indicators such as consistent informal turnover, household cross-subsidisation patterns, and repayment histories through savings groups or community structures.
Many women operating outside the formal sector already show strong financial discipline and business acumen within these models. The task is not to make them fit the system, but to design systems that recognise how they bank.
For inclusion to work at scale, capability must also be built into the entry points of finance, especially where many small and women-owned businesses first interact with the system. Large corporates typically engage through dedicated commercial platforms, but their suppliers, many of whom are SME owners, often transact through channels designed for individual consumers. These interfaces are not equipped to support enterprise activity.
Entry-level platforms should better support essential business functions such as invoicing, transaction tracking, basic tax support and scalable credit tools. When these capabilities are embedded from the start, the system becomes structurally enabling: enterprise activity is captured early, supported consistently, and positioned to grow. For banks, this expands the base of long-term, creditworthy clients and improves the visibility of businesses often seen as high risk. It also ensures that financial inclusion translates into institutional depth, not just market access.
One of the most significant platforms to advance these efforts is now directly within reach.
South Africa’s presidency of the G20 — the first for the African continent — presents a generational opportunity to embed women’s economic empowerment into the core of global growth strategies. B20, the G20 dialogue forum for the global business community, should be actively leveraged through its task force deliberations as a structured avenue to mainstream gender-responsive investment. The private sector must lead decisively, embedding gender criteria into governance structures, procurement systems and enterprise development programmes.
A viable SME today can become a future anchor firm, but only if the financial and policy environment supports growth across different stages.
Financial decision-making may begin with a focus on career-building and income generation, shift toward long-term security and asset ownership, and, for some, adjust during periods when caregiving responsibilities influence how work and enterprise are managed. These stages are neither linear nor uniform, but they shape how women engage with financial systems and plan for growth. Systems that fail to reflect this multiplicity constrain development at every stage.
Designing for inclusion means designing for movement, whether across size, over time, or through changing roles. Financial systems that reflect how women live and work are not an exception; they are a foundation for stronger, more inclusive growth across Africa’s enterprise landscape and the global economy.
• Masithela is interim CEO Absa Corporate and Investment Banking, and co-chair of the B20 sustainable food systems and agriculture task force
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.