Women are often at the centre of Africa’s agricultural labour, making up approximately 43% of the agricultural labour force in developing countries and producing between 60% and 80% of food, according to FAO . Yet despite this central role, women founders building agricultural technology receive a fraction of available capital, and women farmers themselves remain underrepresented as users of the digital tools designed to improve agricultural productivity.
Briter Intelligence data show that women-led agtech startups capture just 7% of all agtech funding in Africa. This is higher than the 2% average across other verticals like fintech, healthtech, and edtech, but still far below the funding received by male-led teams. The disparity reflects not just investor caution, but structural bias. Claire van Enk, CEO of Farm to Feed (a Kenyan agtech that reduces food loss by linking smallholder farmers to businesses via a B2B platform), observes that investors ask her "risk-focused" questions, whereas male founders get "opportunity-focused" questions. She argues this isn't a capacity problem (women don't need more education) but a bias and networking problem.
This bias manifests not only in how much capital women founders receive, but in how that capital is structured. While many women-led businesses are capital efficient and revenue-generating, they are assessed against frameworks designed for different trajectories, notes Lelemba Phiri from Enygma Ventures. “What's emerging is recognition that scale requires not just more capital, but better-structured capital paired with technical support and realistic timelines," she said.
This structural misalignment is particularly visible in agriculture, where women’s participation in African agtech funding has continued to improve in the number of deals but remains underrepresented in funding volume. The number of deals involving at least one woman founder has increased steadily over time, indicating growing inclusion at early and mid-stage entry points. However, gains in funding share have lagged, reinforcing a persistent gap between participation and funding.
Women-founded agtech activity remains largely in high-deal, low-volume categories, particularly focused at the start of the value chain with on-farm services like farm management, ag biotech, and agriculture fintech. By contrast, women-led teams’ representation drops to almost negligible in retail-facing and more capital-intensive downstream segments, where larger ticket sizes dominate, and funding volumes are concentrated. Overall, while inclusion has improved at the deal level, the ongoing shift in funding toward downstream, higher-ticket value chains risks entrenching and potentially widening gender gaps in agtech financing rather than closing them.
A parallel gap in adoption
The underfunding of women founders exists alongside a similar exclusion in the field. Women account for just 25% of registered accounts on digital agriculture platforms in Africa, according to the CGIAR digitisation study. The gap widens when actual tool usage is considered, as structural and financial constraints often limit women's ability to adopt and consistently use digital tools.
This does not mean women are absent from digital agriculture; rather, their participation is often undercounted. Many women access agtech services through male relatives acting as proxies, according to agtech companies interviewed for Seeds of Impact (Briter's catalogue of impact data on African agritech and agrifood innovators).
If productivity-enhancing technologies are deployed to women (who constitute a core segment of the agricultural workforce), observable improvements should be expected in yields, labour efficiency, and total output. Agtech companies interviewed for Seeds of Impact say they are responding with a mix of strategies: leveraging men as intermediaries, while also building products and distribution channels tailored directly to women.
Using men to reach women
In many regions across the continent, owning land is a prerequisite to being recognised as a farmer and accessing government agricultural schemes. However, cultural and legal norms favour male inheritance, which limits women's ability to own land (women own 13% of land in Sub-Saharan Africa). Without land, women work as unpaid family members or hired labourers with limited decision-making power.
Hello Tractor notes that where women own land, they access mechanisation services as easily as men, but in many communities, women use a male proxy to place tractor bookings. Nigeria-based MobiPay recruits men as "change agents" to engage husbands and address concerns around women's access to phones and financial services. Once trust is established at the household level, the company relies on a predominantly female workforce, recognising that women are more likely to trust and adopt financial guidance delivered by other women. Boomitra adopted a similar model when scaling into areas where there weren't enough trained female agents to meet demand. The approach was driven by practical constraints, including agent availability, mobility, and literacy barriers that make traditional outreach harder for rural women, notes Andrea Okun, Marketing Director at Boomitra . Other agtechs, including Vermi-Farm Initiative , use male intermediaries in comparable ways, working through male elders or household heads to legitimise participation before women take on operational roles.
Across these models, men are the visible entry point into systems where land titles, credit eligibility, and public decision-making remain male-controlled. This "work with the men who currently control access, then pivot to women" approach only works if male agents are trained on gender-sensitive engagement and held accountable for women's participation, notes Okun. While this method reflects a pragmatic understanding of local power dynamics, it also carries risk: male intermediaries can capture value intended for women. However, agtechs interviewed are introducing explicit safeguards. Shoshin Hub channels digital payments into wallets that women themselves access. Such measures do not remove the need to engage male leaders, but ensure the door-opening role does not become a permanent filter on women's benefits.
Using women to reach women
While agtechs are experimenting with male intermediaries to reach female farmers, these workarounds have clear limits. Male intermediaries often lack access and trust, making women essential to driving the adoption of digital agriculture tools. "Women consistently report feeling more comfortable receiving guidance from other women, and this shift strengthens trust, confidence, and ongoing engagement," says Collins Ongu, a farm operations executive at Boomitra .
Boomitra and ThriveAgric partner with women-led groups and cooperatives to enrol and support women farmers. ThriveAgric deploys female field agents and delivers training via SMS, voice, and in-person sessions in local languages for women with low literacy or basic phones. As a result of direct outreach to female farmers, the company claims that female farmer participation across its programmes has increased from an initial target of 20% to approximately 40%.
Vet Konect 's Women in Poultry Initiative (WiPi) takes this further by building peer communities where experienced women producers mentor newcomers, creating a multiplier effect for knowledge transfer. These peer structures also enable tracking of actual beneficiaries: rather than reporting impact at the "household" level, WiPi can document changes in women's income, decision-making, and asset ownership. Other agtechs, including Shoshin Hub , adopt similar women-to-women models, using female-led field teams to gather input through flexible home-farm visits and design interventions that fit women's actual constraints.
Across these models, the common thread is trust built through shared identity, language, and lived experience. Where male-intermediary approaches require structural workarounds and safeguards to ensure women benefit, women-to-women models tend to generate more durable engagement and more granular impact data. To understand how these gender dynamics are shaping agtech investment trends across the continent (including who's getting funded and why capital structures still lag behind field realities), pre-register for Briter's upcoming State of Agtech Investment in Africa report.
