The Lagos State Employment Trust Fund and AfriGloCal Venture Capital have opened applications for the third edition of the Female Founders and Funders programme, a structured six-week initiative designed to address one of the most persistent imbalances in Nigeria’s technology ecosystem: the pronounced gap between female-led startups and available investment capital. Delivered through Lagos Innovates, the tech ecosystem support arm of the LSETF, the programme is specifically structured to increase access to capital, mentorship, and strategic networks for early-stage startups that have at least one female founder, with applications open to women building or investing in tech-enabled ventures within Lagos State until 4 April 2026. The initiative operates on a dual-track model that simultaneously equips founders to build scalable businesses and trains aspiring female investors in early-stage funding — an architecture designed to strengthen both sides of the startup pipeline at once.
The six-week programme will deliver structured masterclasses covering business modelling, product-led growth, startup finance, legal frameworks, environmental, social and governance strategy, artificial intelligence integration, and investment readiness — a curriculum that reflects how dramatically the expectations placed on early-stage founders have expanded in an era of AI-integrated product development and increasingly rigorous institutional due diligence. Since its launch, the initiative has supported more than 33 female founders, trained over 24 aspiring female investors, and awarded more than nine million naira in prizes to participating startups, with more than 30 industry mentors contributing guidance on business growth, fundraising strategies, and product development. The second edition, concluded in July 2025, saw six startups pitch at a demo day, with Wakamedics emerging as overall winner ahead of Hub Pharm Africa and Ule Homes.
AfriGloCal’s managing partner, Mope Abudu, has framed the programme’s logic in terms of supply-side structural barriers that training alone cannot solve. Abudu described access to capital as one of the most significant barriers facing female founders, and characterised the Female Founders and Funders initiative as tackling the challenge from both sides — equipping women to build scalable ventures while simultaneously increasing the number of women participating in early-stage investment. That dual intervention matters because the funding gap for female founders in Africa is not merely a pipeline problem: research consistently shows that even well-prepared female founders encounter bias at multiple stages of the due diligence process, and that women investors are more likely to back female-led ventures, making the supply of trained female funders a structural variable in its own right.
