Five successful women founders recently appeared at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to formally receive over $100,000 in equity-free grant funding. These winners of the Tech FoundHER Africa Challenge, an initiative by Naspers and Prosus, represent a dynamic spectrum of the continent’s innovation economy, spanning everything from AI-powered agricultural solutions in Kenya to critical support platforms for gender-based violence survivors in South Africa. For the embattled South African technology investor, Naspers, this event marked much more than a routine corporate responsibility exercise. It clearly signaled a deliberate strategic redirection following a problematic history that had previously seen its flagship venture fund face intense criticism regarding deep-seated diversity failures.
When Naspers first launched its venture capital fund, Foundry, in 2019 with a planned R1.4 billion capital allocation, it was heralded as a potentially transformative force for South Africa’s technology ecosystem. Given that the backing came from Africa’s highest-valued company by market capitalization, expectations for local startup support were exceptionally high. However, by the time Naspers elected to wind down the fund in mid-2023, citing difficult global and domestic investment environments, Foundry had become an unfortunate example of missed social and commercial opportunities. The final deployment statistics revealed a stark disparity: of the R700 million deployed across 23 investments, only 13% of the founders were people of color (HDPs) and a mere 8% were women, figures which provoked widespread indignation in a country historically sensitive to racial equity issues. The South Africa Competition Commission’s report in July 2022 specifically called out Naspers Foundry for having no explicit mandate to support historically disadvantaged persons. The fund’s initial investment in SweepSouth, co-founded by CEO Aisha Pandor, ultimately became its singular investment in a startup with a woman of color in the founding team.
The Tech FoundHER Challenge, launched in September 2025, embodies a fundamentally distinct and targeted approach. It moves away from South Africa-only, equity-based investments toward pan-African, equity-free grants, with an explicit focus on empowering female founders. This initiative, which was first successfully piloted in India earlier in the year, is run in collaboration with Lionesses of Africa, a powerful network comprising 1.8 million women entrepreneurs, to actively source applications. The inaugural African edition attracted a massive response, with over 1,160 applications submitted. Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, South Africa CEO of Naspers, emphasized that the Challenge is fundamentally about addressing “one of Africa’s most urgent gaps in entrepreneurship—the lack of funding and visibility for women-led startups.” She stressed that what these talented entrepreneurs require now is “the capital, networks and market access to scale.”
The announced winners, spanning multiple countries and high-growth sectors, demonstrate the program’s pan-African reach. First place was awarded to Esther Kimani’s Farmer Lifeline (Kenya), which uses solar-powered, AI-enabled devices for early detection of crop pests and diseases, significantly reducing losses for smallholder farmers. Second place went to Folayemi Agusto’s Tix Africa (Nigeria), a self-service platform streamlining event ticketing, sales, and payments across the continent. Joint third place was shared by Margaret Wanjiku’s Pollen Patrollers (Kenya), which develops smart beehive technology, and Jenny Ambukiyenyi Onya’s Neotex (Democratic Republic of Congo), offering AI tools for small livestock farmers. The separate AI for Good category winner was Leonora Tim’s Gender Rights in Tech (South Africa), which provides technology and data tools to support survivors of gender-based violence. The overall focus on female founders aims to address Africa’s immense gender funding disparity: women-led startups receive less than 3% of total venture capital funding on the continent, despite women making up over a quarter of Africa’s entrepreneurs. This disparity represents a huge $42 billion funding gap, which, if successfully closed, could unlock an estimated $316 billion in Gross Domestic Product growth.
