Despite their dominance in Africa’s entrepreneurship landscape, women’s economic potential is dwarfed by multiple challenges in accessing finance like lack of access to productive resources, markets and networks to grow their businesses. This has resulted in an estimated $42 billion financing gap for women entrepreneurs across business value chains on the continent.
Zilla Mary Arach is a multi-award winning Ugandan agritech entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of EzyAgric, an agri-tech company digitizing the agricultural value chain to provide better production and marketing services to farmers and other agribusinesses in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The company’s EzyAgric app has over 5,000 downloads, supporting over 200,000 farmers in 6 countries with plans to expand to Kenya, Ghana, Cote d’ivoire, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Nigeria, next year.
In this article, Zilla shares sage advise on how entrepreneurs can get investment ready and land funding for their enterprises.
- Have a Clear company structure
There are things in the company that need to be straight even before you look for investment. Corporate governance, business model and your financial models have to be organized and viable. - Focused team
Investors usually look out for the teams. For most early start-ups, investors first invest in the people. So they usually look at teams; how organized is this team, how passionate are they, can the team drive the vision? This is simply because it is fruitless to invest money in a weak team that can’t drive the vision. - Build a network
In most cases people invest in the people they know so you need to have a very big network of people you are talking to at any one point. You need to share with them the progress of the company and generally keep them up to date with what’s happening in the company so when you need the funding, you can share your financial model with them for investment. - Seek partners with mutual interests and aligned vision
You need to have strategic partners who are aligned to the vision of the company. They need to believe in it. There are people you meet that don’t believe in the company vision, and need returns immediately, which might not be attainable. These are things you find out as you talk to the partners- over a period of time.
