Women in Africa’s digital economy

In Nairobi’s technology circles, the stereotype of the hoodie-wearing male coder is steadily losing credibility. Kenya’s digital transformation has been shaped in no small part by women.

It was a Kenyan woman, Ory Okolloh, whose blog posts during the 2007 election crisis helped inspire the creation of Ushahidi, the crowd-sourced crisis-mapping platform that later became a global civic-technology tool.

Women also played a decisive role in the early adoption of mobile money. Traders in informal markets were among the first to embrace digital payments, helping transform Kenya into the world’s most advanced mobile payments economy. Yet the statistics tell a more complicated story.

Globally, women make up roughly 30 percent of the technology workforce and only about 22 percent of workers in artificial intelligence. Women also account for just 28 percent of engineering graduates worldwide.

Africa reflects these global patterns, often more starkly. In sub-Saharan Africa, women represent about 30 percent of professionals working in the tech sector. Kenya is no exception. Fewer than 30 percent of ICT roles are held by women, and women account for less than one-third of graduates in ICT-related fields.

This gap matters because Kenya’s economic future increasingly depends on data. From financial services to logistics to healthcare, digital identity systems and trusted data networks are becoming the infrastructure that run modern economies.

At the same time, women remain remarkably prominent in Africa’s entrepreneurial economy. In fact, Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world. Women make up roughly 58 percent of the continent’s self-employed population. Kenya again illustrates this paradox.

Nearly half of the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises are owned by women, contributing roughly a fifth of national gross domestic product.

Africa’s digital future will not be determined only by code, platforms or artificial intelligence. It will be determined by who gets the opportunity to build them. When access to opportunity expands, talent expands with it. And when women gain the tools to shape the digital economy, Africa does not simply become more equal—it becomes more innovative.

A Mastercard research report examining female entrepreneurship across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa indicates that the entrepreneurial drive among Kenyan women remains extraordinarily strong. One recent study found that 93 percent of Kenyan women are considering starting or running a business—far higher than the average across many other regions.

Yet access to capital remains a major constraint. According to the International Finance Corporation, only about 7 percent of women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises in Kenya have access to formal finance. Many entrepreneurs must therefore rely on informal lending networks or mobile credit.

This year’s International Women’s Day theme highlights an important economic truth: investing in women’s opportunity is not charity—it is strategy. When women gain access to finance, tools and infrastructure, the benefits ripple across entire economies.

In the digital age, that infrastructure increasingly revolves around data.

Modern economies run on verification. Banks must verify customers. Governments must verify citizens. Employers must verify credentials. Digital identity systems and trusted data networks increasingly determine who can access financial services, employment opportunities and digital markets.

Traditionally, financial inclusion debates have focused on “Know Your Customer” rules, commonly known as KYC. But as digital labour markets expand, another framework is becoming equally important: “Know Your Employee”, or KYE.

KYE systems allow employers to verify identity, credentials, employment history and professional records through trusted data infrastructure. Properly designed, they reduce hiring friction and allow organisations to recruit talent far beyond traditional networks.

This matters particularly in emerging markets.

Across Africa, employment histories are often fragmented, credentials difficult to verify and hiring networks tightly informal. These barriers tend to disadvantage women disproportionately, especially those who may have taken career breaks or entered the workforce through non-traditional educational pathways.

Better identity and credential verification can help remove these frictions.

At IdentifyAfrica, this dynamic became visible in an unexpected way. Our company, which works in identity verification and data intelligence, did not begin with a deliberate strategy to recruit an all-women team. The outcome simply emerged from hiring the best available talent through transparent, verification-driven processes.

Yet the result is revealing.

When hiring decisions rely less on legacy networks and more on verifiable capability, the talent pool changes. Entirely different candidates begin to appear. In our case, many of those candidates happened to be exceptional women.

The broader lesson is that the future of Africa’s digital economy may depend less on technology alone than on how access to opportunity is structured.

Africa is the world’s youngest continent. By 2050, it will account for roughly a quarter of the global workforce. The infrastructure that determines who participates in that workforce—identity systems, data verification networks and trusted digital platforms—will shape the continent’s economic trajectory.

If those systems are inclusive, Africa’s talent base will expand dramatically.

If they are not, the continent risks reproducing the same structural inequalities that have long constrained economic participation.

Kenya’s experience offers a hopeful signal. When women gain access to education, digital tools and economic infrastructure, they do not simply participate in the digital economy. They reshape it.

Winnie Chira is the founder of Identity Africa