Lack of funding and venture capital (VC) support led SweepSouth’s co-founders Dr Aisha Pandor (CEO) and Alen Ribic (CTO) to sell everything they owned and move back home with her parents.
Pandor, who founded on-demand cleaning services platform SweepSouth in 2014, shared her start-up journey in a panel discussion titled: "How to raise a CEO", with her mother, Dr Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and cooperation, at the 2020 Forbes Woman Africa Leading Women Summit held in Durban last week.
When moderator Gugulethu Mfuphi asked minister Pandor to share her pearls of wisdom on raising a CEO who has made a name for herself in the local tech space, she gave an unexpected, yet honest response: “I thought I had mapped out Aisha’s career track because she was very good in maths and science while growing up. But after she completed her PhD, she told me about this platform that they were building, and her father and I were livid!
“I thought to myself, lo and behold, if this business doesn’t take off, these children are going to come and beg us for money – and that’s exactly what happened in the initial stages of SweepSouth.”
The lack of local funding and support for local tech start-ups is an issue that requires serious attention, as the dearth of venture capital dampens the potential of many viable innovations in Africa, noted minister Pandor.
“Tech start-up incubation tended to be an overseas phenomenon because we didn’t have many risk-takers locally. So SweepSouth struggled with the initial funding, and eventually, overseas funders got them off the ground. It was much later that the local funding scenario improved for them. While we do have VC firms locally, we haven’t yet developed the level of risk-takers that we need to support and help small businesses become successful,” added minister Pandor.
The Cape Town-based start-up has been scaling up in the last few years, creating employment for over 20 000 workers who were previously unemployed or under-employed, and has paid out millions of rands in salaries.
Sharing some of her career challenges, Aisha Pandor pointed out that black women receive 0.2% of tech funding globally, despite making up 8% of the global proportion of tech founders – numbers which she feels are “not encouraging” at all.
“We sold everything that we had to fund the business and we ended up living with my parents for the first four years of SweepSouth. It was tough. Today, I think our company is probably one of about 50 black woman-led tech start-ups globally, which has raised more than $1 million in venture capital funding. So this space is not representative of women, it’s not dynamic and there aren’t near enough women in the forefront running tech companies.”
Investments, noted Pandor, have been the 'rocket ship' that helped SweepSouth fuel growth over the years.
In 2015, the home-cleaning services app was selected to participate in Silicon Valley-based start-up accelerator, 500 Startups. It later received funding from several VC firms, includingDraper Dark Flow, established by Silicon Valley-based investor, Tim Draper; international retail solutions company Smollan; Vumela Fund and blockchain investment services firm, Newtown Partners, owned by Vinny Lingham.
According to a 2018 Ventureburn Tech Start-up Survey, conducted among 153 technology start-up founders, most start-ups were self-funded from the start, citing the biggest challenge they face as access to funds (52%) and a lack of technical staff (10%), with 7% saying the market they are operating in is "too small".
Gender underrepresentation persists in STEM
While Africa’s start-up ecosystem is moving into the mainstream, transforming economies and creating jobs, Pandor feels much still has to be done to support young entrepreneurs, particularly young women in the field.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, women and girls remain largely underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, showing it will take at least another 100 years to bridge the gender gap across the globe.
Pandor pointed out that it doesn’t have to take a century to bridge the gap, if the private and public sectors enforce practical ways to improve women representation in the ICT space: “Our underrepresentation makes these spaces feel foreign, and there are still pre-conceived notions, even if subtle, about the ability of women to be strong, capable, leaders.
“So if we do the all the right things like exposing more girls to STEM-related skills, it doesn’t have to take 100 years for us to bridge the global gender gap. If you put something as simple as a mobile phone in someone’s hand and show them how to use it, you’ll be surprised at how people progress through the available opportunities on the Internet.”
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