The proportion of African technology start-ups with a female co-founder has climbed to a record high, yet venture capital flowing to those companies has shrunk so sharply in the first five months of 2026 that it suggests investors are retreating from female-led businesses even as the supply of such companies grows.

According to the third edition of the Diversity Dividend report, compiled by tech news and research platform Disrupt Africa and shared with Launch Base Africa, 19.2 per cent of 3,331 tracked start-ups across the continent now have at least one woman on their founding team, up from 14.6 per cent when the survey was first published in 2023. Female chief executives lead 12.1 per cent of those companies, compared with 9.6 per cent three years ago.

However, the share of capital allocated to ventures with a female CEO has collapsed to just 2.8 per cent of the $499.6m raised by African tech start-ups between January and May this year. For start-ups with at least one female co-founder, the figure stands at 7.1 per cent. Both are lower than the equivalent ratios recorded in 2021, when the ecosystem was far smaller, and represent a fraction of the peak shares of 8.2 per cent and 16.6 per cent reached in 2023.

“The percentage share of total funding raised by ventures co-founded or led by women has ebbed and flowed over the years, yet there has been no discernible progress made in the last five years,” the report states. “If anything, the first five months of 2026 suggest gender diversity from the perspective of VC in African tech is not in any way a priority.”

The disconnect challenges the often-repeated argument that the shortage of female founders in venture capital portfolios is merely a “pipeline problem” — a belief that there are simply too few investable women-led businesses. The Disrupt Africa data show that the pipeline has in fact widened at the founder and CEO level across almost all major markets, including the “big four” ecosystems of Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya. In Kenya, for instance, 23.6 per cent of start-ups now have a female co-founder, compared with 16.6 per cent in 2023. Nigeria’s share rose from 16.5 per cent to 22 per cent over the same period.

Emmanuel Adegboye, head of Madica, an Africa-focused pre-seed investment programme affiliated with Flourish Ventures that deliberately sources underrepresented entrepreneurs, said: “The conversation should not be about whether exceptional women founders exist in Africa. We see them every day. The real challenge is ensuring they have the same access to capital, networks, and opportunities as their peers.”

Madica’s own portfolio offers a counter-example. Of its 13 investments across eight countries, 53.85 per cent are led by female CEOs and 69.23 per cent have diverse founding teams — ratios that dwarf the ecosystem averages. The programme does not apply quotas; rather, it widens its sourcing channels beyond the established venture hubs and networks where deal flow has historically been dominated by men.

Several female founders interviewed for the report described systemic biases that persist even when they have built businesses with strong traction. Thalia Pillay, co-founder of South African anti-fraud start-up Orca Fraud, said that during fundraising she and her all-female founding team “repeatedly heard suggestions from potential investors that we need a male co-founder.” She added: “It was pretty heartbreaking to be technically competent and have a team composed of a second-time founder and still have to deal with this type of sexism.”

Celina Lee, co-founder and CEO of Zindi, a community of African data scientists, said: “The start-up world is a bit of a boys club. It rewards large egos and an attitude of entitlement. Deals get made based on personal relationships as well as what people call ‘pattern matching’.” That pattern matching, she suggested, tends to reproduce the profile of founders who have already succeeded — typically male.

The funding data bear out such experiences. In 2024, as a global venture capital downturn tightened its grip, African tech start-ups raised a total of $1.1bn, down from $2.4bn the year before. Yet the pain was not evenly distributed: start-ups with at least one female co-founder secured only 7.1 per cent of that total, half the share they had claimed a year earlier. The 2026 early data point of 2.8 per cent for female CEOs is the lowest recorded in the six-year dataset.

Catherine Young, founder of entrepreneurship firm Thinkroom, which invests in and supports founders, argued that the pattern was not only unfair but “economically irrational. When we miss strong founders, we miss companies, jobs, innovation, returns and national growth.” Her own Grindstone Ventures portfolio has allocated 52 per cent of its funding to female founders. “Balanced portfolios are better portfolios,” she said.

The report also highlights sharp sectoral divisions. Fintech, which attracts more capital than any other vertical in Africa, has the poorest gender balance among the five largest sectors: only 8.9 per cent of fintech ventures have a female CEO and 16.5 per cent have a female co-founder. By contrast, legal-tech (31.3 per cent female co-founders), e-health (28.6 per cent) and ed-tech (27.3 per cent) perform far better, yet these sectors typically command much smaller investment rounds.

The data set, built from Disrupt Africa’s own reporting and third-party surveys, covers 3,331 start-ups and tracks only equity and debt funding rounds, excluding grants. Researchers assigned gender through public information and direct company surveys. Though the methodology depends partly on self-reporting, the broad trends have been consistent across multiple editions.

The report’s partners argue that a structural fix requires investors to scrutinise their own sourcing, due diligence and decision-making processes. “If diversity remains a tick-box, a Women’s Month panel, or a paragraph at the end of an investment memo, we will keep having the same conversation every year, with the same disappointing numbers,” Young said.

For now, the numbers show a growing pool of female-founded companies chasing a shrinking — and proportionally declining — pool of risk capital. The question the data pose is not whether there are enough women building venture-scale businesses in Africa, but why the gatekeepers of funding continue to look past them.