Investing in Africa's Women | Africa Trust Group

About us

We are holistic early stage gender-lens investors committed to investing in Africa’s Women entrepreneurs.

Our mission is to drive economic growth and development on the African continent through investing in entrepreneurship development with the hope of contributing to the economic transformation of individuals, communities and regional economies.

What we do

We bridge the gap between women entrepreneurs in Africa who struggle to access finance for scaling their businesses and investors struggling to build healthy pipelines of investible women entrepreneurs in Africa.
We do this by providing early-stage African women entrepreneurs with the holistic support they need to become investor-ready and providing investors with end-to-end funds management and portfolio operations support.

We offer access to

Innovative financing
solutions

Women-enabling
platforms

Entrepreneur development & acceleration through partner platform

Context

Although Africa has the highest rates of female entrepreneurship in the world, the funding gap remains a barrier to achieving full potential.

Currently, women operate over 40% of SMEs in Africa, the African Development Bank has pitted the entire funding gender gap at $42 billion between men and women entrepreneurs.

African GDP could increase 10% by 2025 if the gendergap is narrowed

In Africa, women owned or led businesses received only 2% of funding from VCs (2018).

The average investment for female- or female co-founded companies is half that of male-founded companies.

Almost half (45.8%) of women’s business closure reasons are directly attributed to financial reasons.

Opportunity

Research shows that female-owned businesses consistently out-survive male-owned businesses in many industries. Research has shown that women founded and co-founded companies:

Grow faster, use money more efficiently, and generate more profit.
Have 22% lower turnover rates
Generate more innovation
Deliver higher revenue-more than 2X as much per dollar invested
Deliver 35% more ROI when given access to the right capital, networks and partnerships

Our Approach

Our unique capabilities are highlighted in a 3-pronged approach:

1. Early stage gender-lens funding

Research has shown that the biggest obstacle women face when starting and growing any business is access to funding and ability to raise capital. The IFC reports an approximate $320 billion dollar gap in financing for women and that women-owned businesses appear restricted in their growth paths and are therefore skewed towards smaller firms.

We are the fund managers for:

Enygma Ventures Fund: focused on investing in early stage majority women owned businesses in SADC.
Shift Fund focused on investing in entrepreneurs and innovators in Africa creating solutions that will help redefine our post-pandemic world.
The Empress Fund: An angel syndicate fund focused on innovative financing solutions for women-owned and women-enabling businesses in SADC in the agri-processing, energy and climate sectors.

2. Entrepreneur development and acceleration

Leaders set the tone, pace and culture of an organisation. Therefore, ensuring that the entrepreneur is developing both their personal leadership capacity and business skills is cardinal to creating a growing enterprise that can scale and remain relevant in dynamic market environments.

Our online platform Startupcircles.ai helps entrepreneurs to build commercially viable businesses and provides them guidance and access to a network of like-minded entrepreneurs and investors. The platform makes the startup journey more enjoyable and less lonely for entrepreneurs.

Visit our online Startup School here: StartupCircles.ai

3. Business research and advisory

In this information economy it is easy for investors, policy makers and other key stakeholders looking to invest in entrepreneurship in Africa to get lost in the multitude of information and data. ATG provides research and advisory services in the following areas:

Gender-lens investing
Funds development and management
Entrepreneurship eco-system development

ATG has served clients across Africa, Europe and North America. Projects have included strategy development for gender-lens VC funds, debt funds, gender bonds and eco-system development in various parts of the continent.Download a copy of latest Gender-lens investing project ATG worked on in collaboration with MEDA covering South, East, West and North Africa research here: Download Report