She Wins Africa 2024 – Call for mentors

Mentor Africa's brightest female founders

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Did you know? In 2018, startups with a woman on their founding or leadership team received only 11% of seed financing and only 5% of later-stage venture capital in emerging markets. It’s time to change the narrative. Join the She Wins Africa 2024 program as a mentor and help bridge the gap.

She Wins Africa is a five-year program to improve opportunities for women-led startups to access early-stage financing. Implemented by VC4A in partnership with the International Finance Corporation, the program aims to support women entrepreneurs across sub–Saharan Africa by offering training, mentorship and networking opportunities that will help their startups succeed.

The She Wins Africa 2024 program is dedicated to supporting female-founded startups across Africa. The program’s objective is to improve opportunities for women-led startups to access early-stage financing through investment readiness interventions and connections with investors.

The program is looking for business leaders, successful entrepreneurs, investors and business coaches to work with the 100 African female-founders who’ve been accepted into the program.

Overview

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August 19, 2024
Program dates Jul 30 - Aug 19
Organizer IFC
Website Visit website
Targets Africa
Sectors Sector agnostic

Mentor Profile

The program is recruiting women mentors from various backgrounds across Africa, we are looking for:

  • Experienced professionals in tech, business, and entrepreneurship
  • Individuals in leadership roles across various industries
  • Successful founders and CEOs
  • Angel investors and venture capitalists
  • English- and French-speaking mentors  

Program Background

She Wins Africa is aimed at accelerating access to startup capital for women-led startups and building a gender-lens investing moment by:

  • Tailored training interventions to address unique investment readiness gaps for women and help them position their startups for potential investments.
  • Facilitate connections with potential investors including venture capital firms, private equity funds, and financial institutions to help women-led start-ups expand their network and gain experience in pitching their businesses.
  • Improve the capacity of private equity /venture capital (VC)funds to implement gender-lens investing strategies and new practices aimed at better reaching women-led startups and enterprises.
  • Increase the capacity of entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs) in Africa to support the incubation of early-stage women-led startups and build a strong pipeline of investible startups.

Mentorship Program Structure

This is an 11-month program, going from August 2024 to June 2025. Accepting to be part of the program, would require you to meet with your mentee at least once every month for 60 – 90 mins (physically or virtually) to work with them on their identified business issues. You will be working with founders at different stages of growth across the 3 tracks of the program; Launch, Grow and Scale.We hope you will find it interesting to connect with one of the founders and therefore this is structured as a pro-bono mentorship program. 

Benefits of Becoming a She Wins Africa Mentor

  • Recognition as an official She Wins Africa Program mentor from the IFC and VC4A
  • Additional visibility in the VC4A Mentorship Marketplace to engage with other companies
  • Help in decreasing the existing gap in funding opportunities between women entrepreneurs and male entrepreneurs
  • Discover new investment opportunities
  • Expand your network and connect with like-minded mentors across Africa

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