The Commercial Case for Being a Black Woman in Tech

I did not set out to make a point. I set out to build a company. But when you are a Black woman who co-founds a technology business in Johannesburg, making a point becomes part of the job, whether you sign up for it or not. Every meeting where someone looks past me to my technical co-founder. Every pitch where the first question is about our "team size" rather than our work. Every room where I am the only one who looks like me. I have made peace with all of it. Not because it is acceptable, but because I understand something that I think gets missed in conversations about gender and tech: the gap is not just a justice issue. It is a commercial opportunity. And I intend to exploit it fully. ## The numbers nobody is comfortable saying out loud Let me be direct about the landscape. Only 10% of CEO roles in African tech startups are held by women. In software development specifically, women hold just 8% of positions, the lowest representation of any tech discipline. Across South Africa's entire ICT sector, only 23% of roles are held by women, that is 56,000 women in a sector of 236,000 people. A McKinsey report on gender parity in African tech found that just 52 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men at equivalent levels. The pipeline leaks at every stage: recruitment, retention, promotion, and funding. In 2025, across the entire African continent, male-led startups captured roughly 75% of all venture capital raised, leaving 10% shared by companies with at least one female founder. These are not numbers I find inspiring. They are numbers I find clarifying. ## What the gap actually means commercially Here is the part that does not get discussed enough. When a market systematically excludes a group of people from building within it, it also systematically excludes that group's perspective from shaping the products it creates. That means there are categories of problems, problems that affect women, that affect Black South Africans, that affect businesses run by people who do not fit the default profile of a "founder", where the software being built is designed by people who have never lived those problems. That is not a diversity talking point. That is a product gap. And product gaps are where businesses are built. R.E.A.C.H. exists, in part, because Thando and I both noticed that most of the software being sold to South African businesses was built for someone else's context. Our clients are not Silicon Valley sales teams. They are occupational health companies in Johannesburg, service businesses in Durban, professional practices run by people who have built real operations with limited resources and need technology that respects that reality. We understand those clients because we are those clients. That is a competitive advantage that no amount of funding buys. ## On being taken seriously I am not interested in writing an article about how difficult it is to be a woman in tech. That story has been told, and it is true, and it changes very little on its own. What I am interested in is accountability, my own, first. If the industry underestimates women founders, then the commercial response is to build something undeniable. Not to ask for a seat at a table someone else built, but to build a better table and invite people to it. That is the only strategy I have found that actually works. Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurial activity in the world at approximately 24% according to the IFC. More women than men on this continent choose to start businesses. The problem is not ambition. It is that the systems designed to support growth, funding, mentorship networks, visibility, technical access, were not designed with us in mind. The South African government's Digital Economy Master Plan has begun to address this directly, with digital transformation projected to contribute nearly 20% of South Africa's GDP by 2028 and create 300,000 jobs. That transformation will require building companies, not just policies. Women need to be the ones building them. ## What R.E.A.C.H. is doing about it We are a two person company. We do not have a CSR programme or a foundation. What we have is a business that we run with the same rigour, the same standards, and the same ambition as any other company in this market, except that we carry a commercial philosophy that is rooted in who we are. Every system R.E.A.C.H. builds is built to reduce dependency. We do not build software that locks clients into us forever. We build systems that make their operations genuinely independent, that their team can understand, use, and maintain without us holding their hand indefinitely. That is a values position, but it is also a commercial one: clients who trust you because you gave them real capability, not because you created dependency, are clients who refer you to everyone they know. We are CIPC registered. We are BEE compliant. We are Black owned and women led. Not because those designations are marketing tools, but because they reflect real things about who we are and what we understand about this market. ## To the women reading this If you are building something in tech, or thinking about it, I want to say one thing plainly: the barriers are real and the numbers are genuinely discouraging, and none of that is a reason to not build. The commercial case for your perspective, your context, your understanding of problems that the default founder profile has never had to solve, that case is stronger than it has ever been. The market is large, the gap is real, and the businesses that get built from the inside of that gap tend to serve their clients better than the ones that look at it from the outside. Build the thing. Run it properly. Be undeniable. That is the strategy.