Finance leaders, investors, and corporate boards are calling for more diversity and a reduced gender gap. Despite managing 40% of SMEs, women receive only 1% of venture capital (VC) investments in Africa. Women-founded companies generate twice as much income per dollar invested as men-founded companies.
This deficit is now costing countries in sub-Saharan Africa $95 billion per year. In an effort to bridge the gender gap, several programs, such as women-focused accelerators, have been developed to assist more women-led SMEs in becoming investment-ready. Grindstone, an accelerator that has been around for nine years, has just launched one of these accelerators in partnership with Naspers Labs, a youth development initiative.
Grindstone X Programme
This South African accelerator is focused on women-led SMEs and will give them professional expertise, helpful networks, money, and markets to make them more investable, scalable, and exit-ready.
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The program will be based on groups of people, or cohorts, and will last for a total of three years, with each group going for a year. In collaboration with Naspers Labs, a youth development initiative run by Naspers, the Grindstone startup accelerator will explore South Africa each year for 10 of the most successful companies in the country that were started by women.
The Grindstone Accelerator is a structured program for the development of entrepreneurship that provides assistance to innovation-driven businesses in the process of engineering exponential growth. The curriculum gives start-ups access to capital and markets, as well as to the specialist knowledge, networks, and investors that are necessary for their success.
During the course of the trip, which lasts for a year, the start-up companies will have an evaluation done on their enterprises, and they will get interventions that will help them go through a growth process and transformation in their companies.
Business strategy reviews, planning for going to market, preparation for funding readiness, networking, business coaching from exceptional coaches (including some of the Grindstone Alumni companies that have successfully scaled their businesses), and financial support from Naspers Labs are all a part of the program.
“There is so much untapped female entrepreneurial talent in South Africa, and we need to get creative in how to unearth this at scale,” says Grindstone partner Keet van Zyl.
Innovative corporates, such as Naspers Labs, and programs with a strong track record of engineering start-up development, such as Grindstone, concentrate on personalized interventions for founders that favorably influence their company’s KPIs.
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Head of Naspers Labs, Mapule Ncanywa, stated, “As Naspers Labs, we are committed to assisting the development of micro-enterprises with an emphasis on young women.” Through this partnership, we aim to help grow the tech sector and the economy by unlocking the potential of female-founded start-ups.”40% of Africa’s SMEs are led by women, yet they get just 1% of VC investment. According to a Boston Consulting Group report, women-led start-ups are more likely to succeed when financed. They provide double the income for every dollar spent.
Grindstone will prioritize ACI female-founded start-ups, teenagers, people with impairments, and those living in less wealthy areas when recruiting for this goal.
Knife Capital and Thinkroom Consulting own Grindstone, which prepares African SMEs for market access. Andrea Böhmert, Catherine Young, and Keet van Zyl head a team of business-building professionals that assist participants.