by Melanie Hawken, Founder & CEO, Lionesses of Africa
On 17 September 2025 in The Hague, we gathered for Start‑Up Night Africa — our third time hosting this event in the Netherlands, in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Netherlands, and the seventh event of its kind around the globe. It remains clear why the Netherlands serves so well as our European HQ: it is a hub of innovation, a champion of gender equality, and a bridge for African women entrepreneurs seeking to access new markets and investment.
Start‑Up Night Africa is more than an inspiring showcase: it is a key output of Lionesses of Africa’s Access to Markets and Investment Programme, which is precisely designed to connect high‑growth women‑led businesses — whether on the African continent or here in our European diaspora hub — with investment, with market opportunity, and with the capacity they need to be investment ready.
Why this matters: the data behind the urgency
The challenges Africa’s women entrepreneurs face in accessing growth capital are real, large, and well documented. According to the African Development Bank’s AFAWA (Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa) initiative, there is still a $42 billion financing gap for women entrepreneurs in Africa compared to their male counterparts. But AFAWA aims to unlock USD $5 billion in financing by 2026, including through the Guarantee for Growth program implemented with the African Guarantee Fund, which helps de‑risk lending to women‑led SMEs.
These numbers underline what we already see in our network: many women have ambition, many have strong business models — but few have had the visibility, capacity or support that enables them to access the growth funding that scales their impact.
We are proud to partner with AFAWA, African Guarantee Fund, and our government partners, to help change that picture. Through this partnership:
We work with women entrepreneurs to become investment ready through our capacity development programmes— helping them sharpen their financial profiles, strengthen their business plans, develop pitch readiness, and think through what investors want to see.
We enable access to the Guarantee for Growth facility, which helps partner financial institutions offer more gender‑sensitive products, often backed by guarantees to reduce risk in extending credit to women‑led businesses.
We run capacity‑building, mentorship, knowledge sharing, training, and networking events (of which Start‑Up Night Africa is one), to ensure that more women don’t just dream big, but are equipped to deliver big in key markets that are traditionally hard to reach.
Sparking the Ripple Effect
At Start‑Up Night Africa in The Hague, we celebrated ten outstanding high‑growth women entrepreneurs, each building businesses that are disrupting norms, creating jobs, and driving economic, environmental and social change. The goal was not only to showcase their journeys, but to provide tangible opportunities: to connect with investors, to explore European and African markets, to partner, to collaborate. And beyond that, to spark what I call the ripple effect — so that when one succeeds, many others see a path forward. We reaffirmed together that growth capital isn’t a luxury for a select few — it is a necessity for inclusive economic growth, job creation, gender equality, and for the future prosperity of the continent.
The bottom line is that when women entrepreneurs grow, everyone benefits — their businesses, their communities, and Africa’s future prosperity. We must shift attitudes on the part of investors, buyers, and decision-makers and encourage them to see investment in the growth of women’s entrepreneurship as a core strategy for economic development.
Lionesses of Africa exists so that women entrepreneurs have visibility, have access, and are investment ready — not someday, but now. Visibility means both showcasing what women are doing and ensuring they are seen by the right people — investors, partners, policy makers. Access means enabling the concrete connections and support needed. Investment readiness means the hard work, tools, mentorship and development behind the scenes. Partnerships are the power behind driving this positive change — between organisations like ourselves at Lionesses of Africa, entrepreneurs, investors, ecosystem actors, governments, and institutions like AFAWA and the African Guarantee Fund — together, this is how we build a pipeline of investment ready women entrepreneurs who can seize opportunities and scale.
A Vision Forward
Our objective at Lionesses of Africa is not only to host events like Start‑Up Night Africa in key markets around the world, although these are powerful, impact-focused initiatives that deliver results. What truly shifts the dial is the ongoing work: capacity building, making women entrepreneurs funding ready, forging partnerships that close financing gaps, creating structures and ecosystems that sustain growth. We envision a future where thousands of high‑growth women entrepreneurs in our 1.8 million strong network are scaling their businesses, creating thousands of much needed jobs, exporting, and innovating. Where governments, banks, and donors see investing in women entrepreneurs not as a risk but as one of the safest, highest return investments on the African continent.
If you share this vision, I invite you to join us. Whether you are an investor ready to fund, a financier ready to listen, a policy maker ready to enact, or an entrepreneur ready to step up — let’s go Further, Together.
You can reach me at melanie@lionessesofafrica.com. Let’s work now to make funding access a normative pathway for African women entrepreneurs.