Beyond Funding: Access gap holding back SA’s women-led businesses

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.