Presentation of our series meets these women scientists and entrepreneurs, hope for development of the continent.
by Le Monde Africa
There are already beautiful stories, successes that make the lines moving. From Tangier to Johannesburg, university women know how to make their scientific results to create high value-added businesses and put a foot in the world still very masculine business. But they still remain exceptions on a road that has nothing linear.
Choosing the world of science or technology, getting rid of stubborn social norms who are more likely to live in homes than business chefts, completing long studies, and finding funding: a swing path where the reasons to let go follows one another.
First, we have to go through the skimming towards secondary education, whose girls are more often excluded than boys. On the continent, the literacy rate of boys remains on average 1.3 times higher than that of girls. Moreover, men will be better able to follow secondary education and more post-baccalaureate and opt for scientific studies globally little selected on the African continent. In Senegal, for example, 80% of students choose the humanities, and statistics repeats itself in other sub-Saharan countries, further aggravated by the fact that boys are more naturally pushed towards these studies than girls.
A loss of luck all the more prejudicial for the girls they have of the audacity and that a rise in technical and scientific skills would open a new field full of promises and possible to meet the daily needs of the populations of this continent in full mutation. Because, whatever the initial training that women choose, Africa remains the continent of female entrepreneurship par excellence: a quarter of them are patrunns while in OECD countries this rate falls to 7 %.
Survival entrepreneurship
African people invent an entrepreneurial of survival, often to feed their children. With 39.6%, the Sub-Saharan band has the highest percentage of women entrepreneurs worldwide. On these lands where the wage labor is the exception and not the norm, they invent a business within their reach, which provides a solution to the gaps of the local offer. It would be more exact to say that they try to do it because their path does not necessarily end with the maturation of their idea of business … because we must then find the funds to start.
According to Daniel Halim, an economist responsible for gender inequalities at the World Bank, women entrepreneurs face a $ 1,500 billion funding deficit on the planet, a fault that first affects Africa.
Again, secular habitus make it more difficult to grant a loan to a woman than a man, practices all the more damaging than a case shows on average 34% higher yield when she is Led by a woman, according to a study of the cabinet Roland Berger published in March 2020.
The addition of these factors explains that, despite the explosion on the continent of start-ups in the field of new technologies, only 27% of women African entrepreneurs exercise a profession related to technology or science. There is, however, a real solution to meet the daily challenges of access to water, electricity, education or health to which they are facing.
Le Monde Africa offers a series of reports to meet these women who make the statistics lie and have managed to combine passion for science and business.