By Monica G. Ng’aru
Over the past few weeks, we have demystified what femtech is, identified the challenges, seen the opportunities and mapped out the African femtech ecosystem. With this article, we want to explore why it’s important for us to invest in Africa’s femtech sector and nurture its growth and how Jaza Rift is actively doing so.
Why invest now?
- Opportunities to close the gap for the underserved community
The female community, more so in emerging markets, is significantly underserved when it comes to accessing better healthcare services and products to assist in their care across their health life cycle. Due to the increase in awareness and normalization of taboo topics around women’s health, there are innovators (both women and men) intentionally innovating to solve the challenges women experience in accessing healthcare products, services and information to aid them in increasing their understanding of their bodies and making informed decisions about their health. This ends up promoting better healthcare outcomes for women in society. In Africa we believe that empowering women always creates a ripple effect to cause the betterment of the society as a whole.
- Alignment with global initiatives
Organisations globally are aligning themselves with impact initiatives when it comes to making decisions in investments and support initiatives. The UN has managed to establish a well renowned impact framework (the 17 SDGs) through which organisations consciously strive to ensure they abide by; acting as a compass. SDG 5 which involves striving towards gender equality and women’s empowerment, has created awareness and an environment where we can see funders, corporates, businesses, projects and individuals developing conscientiousness to ensure a balance on what and whom to focus on to level the playing field.
- Market potential
The FemTech sector is developing fast and has impressive potential. Founders are dedicated to normalizing the conversation around taboo topics and putting more innovation around menopause, pelvic health care, chronic disease management, sexual wellness and education, and urinary health. According to Femtech Analytics; The global FemTech Market Size accounted for $40.2 billion in 2020 and is projected to grow at an average CAGR of 13.3% from 2020 until 2025 to reach $75.1 billion. Despite increasing interest in recent years, the industry remains underestimated and has high growth potential. There is a lack of information of the actual sizing of Africa’s femtech sector as it is still young and upcoming. With more awareness, more traction will be built to be able to map out the market size.
- More opportunities for funding and mentorship opening up
With the increase of innovation in the space, there’s an increase in appetite from both the public and private sector players to invest their resources to ensure the sustainable growth and development of the sector. Not just governments across Africa, but also, funders (VC/PE firms, NGOs, DFIs, Angels, etc) and support organisations (Incubators and Accelerators) investing capital and offering technical assistance to assist and encourage the innovators to continue solving the challenges experienced by women in healthcare.
- Opportunities created for PPPs
Borrowing from the point above, different parties have developed an interest to contribute to the growth of the femtech sector both globally and in Africa. Said parties exist both with the public and the private sectors. To embrace the spirit of wanting to drive great impact in society, both sectors have come together to support initiatives and innovations around gender equality and women empowerment. Most recently, the government of Rwanda is partnering with organisations such as Briter Bridges, incubators, accelerators and VC firms to spread awareness and attract innovators in the femtech space for their Hanga Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) Program whose aim is to explore the opportunity that exists for technology enabled startups to solve key issues in SRH to accelerate better outcomes. This is one of the PPP that’s currently active in the healthcare space.
Positioning of Jaza Rift.
Why Jaza Rift would be the preferred partner for impact in the femtech sector in Africa?
- Part of our thesis
At Jaza Rift, we aim to contribute to better healthcare outcomes through investing in healthcare innovations and inventions across Africa. We aim to impact over 30 million Africans by 2030 and believe this cannot be done without empowering women by promoting their better healthcare outcomes. Utilising our internal framework and UN’s SDG 3, 1, 5 and 8 as a guide for measuring impact, our investment team is able to make decisions as to which kind of startups and teams to invest in.
- Innovation Hub
Jaza Rift’s innovation hub arm will be having a Femtech focused lab for existing solutions and new femtech solutions in digital health, medtech and biotech. Through our innovation hub, we enable founders to build and launch companies, create opportunities and shape Africa’s healthcare and accessibility future. Compared to traditional investment and startup creation approaches, venture studios give 44% better results when it comes to the success rate of startups built – 84% of startups coming out of studios make it to the seed round. To find out more, click here.
- Critical partnerships
We have a strong presence in the healthcare sector as an investor that specifically focuses on healthcare innovations. This has made us thought leaders in the space and positioned us to provide value to the partnerships and investments we make. Our current existing strong partnerships are with Villgro Africa; a healthcare focused incubator and accelerator, with over 8 years of experience in the healthcare space running programs that aid in supporting innovators go to market, investor readiness and leveraging on their own networks to support the innovators. Besides Villgro Africa, we’ve managed to establish relationships with other funders and support organisations that have been critical for Jaza Rift to position themselves in Africa’s healthcare ecosystem.
As one of the key stakeholders in Africa’s healthcare private sector, we aim to collaborate with others within the space and anyone else who’s interested in the space to drive change and invest our collective resources as we support femtech founders as they innovate and grow their solutions and impact across the African continent and beyond. Feel free to reach out to us via our socials or email. We look forward to more collaborations and partnerships.
