3 Female-Founded Startups Using Tech to Create an Inclusive World for Women
Women have existed since the beginning of time. And unlike some people will have you believe, women have worked and contributed to national growth since the beginning of time too.
Well in 2021, women are now at the forefront of digital and global solutions to everyday problems, including those specific to our gender.
From co-building the popular savings app PiggyVest, to HealthTracka helping people access medical tests from the comfort of their homes, and even Ejara, a crypto tech company in Cameroon. Female founders are here to stay.
To celebrate the International Day of the Girl Child this year whose theme is ‘Digital Generation, Our Generation’, here are 3 women-founded startups using technology to create an inclusive and better world for women.
In FinTech: Oraan
When Halima Iqbal moved back to Pakistan in 2017, she had a difficult time opening a bank account simply because she's a woman. What is an easy process in many countries, and would have been easier for a man in Pakistan, took her three and a half months to achieve.
Her experience led her to start researching on financial inclusion of Pakistani women and how they handled things like saving and taking loans. From her research, only about 7% of Pakistani women had a bank account because of the social barriers involved in opening one. According to a recent interview with TechCrunch, she said,
“when a woman goes into a bank, the first question we get asked is ‘why do you even need bank account?’”.
This experience led Halima and her co-founder Farwah Tapal to create a digital platform - Oraan - to help Pakistani women access financial services.
Oraan has plans of growing into a neobank which will enable women to access credit, invest in mutual funds, and many more.
When women are financially empowered, we have the audacity and ability to create desired worlds for ourselves and leave unfavorable ones behind. This is evident as Oraan has helped some of its users raise IVF fees and leave abusive relationships.
In EdTech: Heels and Tech
Speaking for most Nigerian women, when we were younger we were told to learn to cook and clean because we had to grow up to become “good wives”.
For many of us careers in Engineering, Sciences, and STEM seemed off-limits because we were told they're for men.
“Doctors are men and nurses are women.” “Pick something easier because you'll still end up at home while your husband works.”
I wish those are words of the past, but we still see schools condition children into thinking there should be a difference in their aspirations simply because of their sex.
Things like this have greatly affected women’s interest and participation in the tech industry. But thankfully, things are starting to look up with women accounting for 28.8% of the global tech workforce in 2020. An increase from 25.9% in 2018 and 26.2% in 2019.
Heels and Tech, an online education platform, was founded by Nigerian Abisola Alabi to bridge the gap between women and the tech industry. The best part is while many people think coding is the one necessary skill for anyone in tech to have, Abisola is changing that notion.
By empowering women from all over the world with noncoding tech skills in Agile Methodologies and Enterprise Applications, Heels and Tech is contributing to the future increase in the number of women in tech.
In FemTech: Juno Bio
“Vaginas are actually super stressful to maintain. Your vagina can be squeaky clean by 8am & by 10pm you have yeast infection bc you ate/drank some shit.”
These words are 100% relatable to me and most women as the replies show.
It’s because of struggles like this Hana Janebdar, an Afghan woman, founded Juno Bio to help women and people with vaginas easily test and understand their vaginal microbiome aka the microorganisms and bacteria that live in our vaginas.
There's a normal level of bacteria in each vagina. An increase is what results in infections ranging from yeast to even preterm births. What Juno Bio does is helps women with test kits, digitalized results of tests, and access to health professionals (vaginal coaches) so you understand what’s happening with your body and causing recurrent issues (if any).
Juno Bio is giving women knowledge of their bodies and doing important work in women's health research - an area which has been highly ignored and mostly focused on White Women. This obvious gap in research was what inspired Hana to build this.
Conclusion
Even though 20% of startups in the world have at least one female founder, there are still issues in funding allocation to these women-led startups. In 2020, Crunchbase data showed only 2.3 percent of VC dollars went to female-led startups, a drop from 2.8 percent in 2019.
These figures are worse when you look at it in the context of Africa. According to research by Africa: The Big Deal
“In 2021 so far, female single founders & female-only founding teams have only raised 0.7% of all funding raised by start-ups in Africa ($18m out of almost $2.7bn). On the other hand, 84% of the funding has gone to male single founders & male-only founding teams.”
One of this publication’s major goal is to bring such issues to light while giving female founders the spotlight they deserve and also knowledge needed to navigate the startup world.
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