Over the past few months, I’ve been on maternity leave, adjusting to life with a newborn while watching the incredible work of thecontinue from the sidelines. Returning to work has been exciting, but it’s also given me a new perspective on something we don’t talk about enough: what it means to build while raising a family, especially more than one child.
The startup world often celebrates founders who work around the clock, move fast, and sacrifice everything for growth. For many mothers, entrepreneurship doesn’t look like that. It looks like taking investor calls between naps, making strategic decisions on very little sleep, and building companies while caring for the people who matter most. Women still carry a disproportionate share of unpaid childcare in most countries, and that’s the hidden mechanism behind slower fundraising timelines, less geographic flexibility, and fewer hours for the “always-on” grind VCs expect. The challenge isn’t whether mothers can build great companies; the question is whether our entrepreneurial ecosystem is designed to support us.
At, we’ve had the privilege of working alongside remarkable women founders across Africa. Many of them are not simply building successful companies; they’re redesigning work itself. They know firsthand that flexibility, trust, and inclusive business models aren’t “nice-to-haves”; they’re essential if more women are going to participate and thrive in the digital economy.
As one of our portfolio companies’ founders said;
“I didn’t build a company despite being a mother. I built it because motherhood shaped the leader I became.”
– Nkem Okocha, Founder & CEO, Mamamoni
That’s the thinking behind our seven-point Inclusivity Framework, which gives platforms a practical roadmap for embedding inclusion into their core models and behind partners like Instollar, whose Installher program trains young women to enter the solar industry.
Motherhood has reminded me that building something meaningful is rarely linear. I’m excited to be back and to continue learning from the founders who are proving every day that even though it is hard and takes effort, inclusive innovation is happening.
Until next time,
Michelle
📖 Our insights
This month, we published our latest investment story, and there’s a lot to dig into:
Why We Invested: Fixa: In Rwanda’s Northern Province, miners carry 30–70kg bags of tungsten out of tunnels on their backs, and their entire work history lives as tick marks in a paper booklet. When the job ends, that history disappears with it. We backed Fixa because we think verified employment identity could be Africa’s next major infrastructure shift, and this is how they’re building it.
👂 Overheard
Overheard at our microenterprises webinar: Cathy Chepkemboi, CEO of Tushop, on what she sees across Africa’s smallest businesses. She told a story of a shop owner with thousands of sales and years of loyal customers, with no digital record of any of it, which could lock the businesses out of credit, and easy repeat sales, and growth.
Watch the full session for how platforms are closing that gap.
🗞️ Who’s making the news
Digital services for micro-enterprises
- Egyptian platformBrainsMingle has raised $400,000 in seed funding from BasharSoft. Its video-first platform rolls the whole expert toolkit, live sessions, bookings, payments, and community, into one place so professionals can actually earn from what they know. When a big regional recruiter starts betting on knowledge-sharing, it’s worth asking if that’s the next layer of Africa’s talent market.
- Recently launched Nigerian platformSiiqo just put a full shop inside Telegram, letting small vendors list products, take orders, and get paid in fiat or crypto without ever leaving the chat. Its built-in escrow tackles the fake-payment scams that quietly kill trust in social commerce, a sign that the next wave of vendor tools won’t live in standalone apps but inside the messaging platforms where African SMEs already sell.
Platforms for offline work
- South African platformWRAPPED wants to be the place African film and TV get crewed, pulling hiring out of the WhatsApp groups and lost Facebook posts where a gig can vanish in two minutes. With MultiChoice backing and crew sorted by skill and experience, it’s a real shot at formalising one of the continent’s most chaotic and fastest-growing job markets.
📆 What’s on our calendar
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Counting jobs is easy; knowing whether they’re any good, from the perspective of the people doing them, is the harder question. In this ANDE Pan-African webinar, we dig into what workers actually told us, and share our Quality of Work Measurement Tool, co-created with the Measurement in Jobtech Working Group and tested with 281 workers in Nigeria.