Our first Female Founder Takeover event took place in Kigali, Rwanda, as part of AfriLabs’ 2023 Annual Gathering, a key event in Africa’s tech and entrepreneurial calendar to drive sustainable growth and innovation. The AfriLabs Gathering brought together key ecosystem players from across the continent, alongside global thought leaders and entrepreneurship enthusiasts.

We used our session at the Annual Gathering to showcase the Feminist African Manifesto for Entrepreneurship (FAME), a project born of the well-documented need for policies, policymakers and policymaking processes to work better, for African women founders to thrive. The project aims to support policymakers in developing innovative and radical policies to help women entrepreneurs in a complex startup environment, by promoting and creating participatory processes convening experts and stakeholders in workshops to co-create foundations for feminist innovation policies.

As the Annual Gathering took place during the early stages of the FAME project, this was our first attempt at doing just that. We used the session as an opportunity to share some hard-hitting facts about why this project is important (see Figure 1) and our direction. The session brought together a small group of African female founders and representatives from policy bodies and iNGOs to explore specific policies required to improve the sustainability and impact of women-led businesses. It highlighted the need for existing incentives and initiatives to go further and everyone left the session invigorated and excited to see FAME come to life.

We are proud to share the FAME Policy Brief! Click here to read the Policy Brief, including an analysis of the Ghanaian startup ecosystem and the policy recommendations generated by Ghanaian women entrepreneurs striving to thrive.