By Esther Annette Lumumba, Founder and Managing Director of Étoile Advisory Group
Picture two founders whose businesses are, on paper, equally strong: similar revenue, similar growth trajectory, similar quality of product and team. One has spent a decade sitting on boards and moving through the WhatsApp groups where South African business quietly introduces itself to itself, while the other has spent that same decade building her business without ever being let into those rooms.
When a corporate buyer or an investment committee decides who gets the next contract or the next round of funding, it is rarely the stronger plan that settles the outcome, it is whether the founder was ever introduced to the person making that decision in the first place. That is the deeper problem underneath the funding conversation: funding is usually only the final step in a much longer process of being seen, vetted, and recommended by people already inside the room.”
This year’s Women’s Month, observed nationally under the government’s official theme, “Empowered Women Empower the Nation,” gestures toward this same point. At the programme’s launch in Durban on 1 August, the Department of Small Business Development named limited access to procurement, markets, and business development support as barriers sitting alongside limited access to finance, suggesting government’s own framing has begun to move beyond capital as the sole explanation.
Two recent assessments back this up with real numbers. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2026 report on South Africa, released 30 July by Stellenbosch Business School, the University of Johannesburg, North West University, and the Small Enterprise Development and Finance Agency, scored the country’s entrepreneurial environment at just 3.9 out of 10, seventh from the bottom of 56 countries against a global average of 4.7, built from access to finance, markets, government support, regulation, and infrastructure together.
A related finding comes from a country assessment under the UN Development Programme’s regional ECoWYERT initiative, run with the Mastercard Foundation to strengthen women and youth-led enterprises’ trade participation across six African countries. The South African findings, discussed at a UNDP validation session in July, concluded the country is not constrained by a shortage of policy, institutions, or infrastructure, but by the failure of those systems to translate into practical opportunity, naming women and youth-led enterprises as the most disconnected from the market linkages and trade networks needed to grow beyond a local footprint.
What this looks like in practice is a founder who meets every criterion a procurement officer claims to be looking for, and still never makes the shortlist, not because her business fails an objective test, but because the shortlist was quietly built from an existing network of relationships she was never part of. Access, understood this way, is not a soft concern sitting alongside the harder barrier of capital. It functions as its own gatekeeping mechanism, deciding long before any funding decision is made whether a business gets seen by the right people at all.
The cost of leaving this unaddressed is measurable. The World Economic Forum estimates that closing gender gaps globally could add as much as $12 trillion to global GDP, with the effect on some countries’ output reaching as high as 35 percent, and a 2026 analysis with the Boston Consulting Group found that women’s economic participation across Africa has fallen since 2022, pushing the continent’s projected timeline to economic parity from roughly 120 years to closer to 170, fifty additional years lost largely because access to markets, networks, and capital has not kept pace with the continent’s recovery.
What makes this gap difficult to close is that it rarely involves anyone consciously deciding to exclude a woman-led business. Boards and investors who would never knowingly overlook a qualified founder still default to the same familiar networks and warm introductions, not out of intent to exclude, but because changing that habit takes more deliberate effort than most people put into who they introduce to whom.
Closing this gap will not come from another training programme or pitch competition, because the barrier most of these women face is not a lack of preparation but a lack of proximity to decision-makers, and proximity has to be deliberately built and resourced like any other critical business input, not left to develop through networks that took decades to form and were never representative of the businesses South Africa now needs to grow. What actually needs to move is not another funding statistic, it is how many capable, women-led businesses are given a genuine route to the people who can say yes.
Esther Annette Lumumba is Founder and Managing Director of Étoile Advisory Group, a strategic advisory and business development firm helping organisations enter and expand within African markets. Working across Energy, Finance, Infrastructure, and Mining, Étoile connects organisations with decision-makers, strategic partners, and government stakeholders, and turns those relationships into commercial outcomes.
