Across the world, women are starting businesses at extraordinary rates. In Africa in particular, female entrepreneurship rates are among the highest globally. Women are building ventures across retail, manufacturing, agriculture, technology, and services, often under challenging institutional conditions.
Yet a persistent paradox remains. Despite high levels of participation, women-led firms frequently grow more slowly and create fewer jobs than expected.
For decades, policymakers and development organisations have interpreted this gap primarily through the lens of access to finance. As a result, many entrepreneurship support programmes focus on helping women entrepreneurs become investor ready — preparing them to secure capital through improved pitch decks, financial projections, and scalable business models.
These interventions are important. Capital matters. But the continued gap between entrepreneurial participation and growth outcomes raises an important question: does investor readiness capture the capabilities entrepreneurs actually need to sustain ventures in institutionally complex environments?
The Limits of a Finance-Centric Framework
Investor readiness has become the dominant framework in accelerators and entrepreneurship programmes. It evaluates ventures based on their preparedness to attract investment, typically through three dimensions:
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technology readiness
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market readiness
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management readiness
These signals help investors assess whether ventures are viable and scalable. In environments with well-developed financial markets, such signals can indeed correlate strongly with firm performance.
However, in many emerging economies entrepreneurs operate in contexts characterised by:
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institutional uncertainty
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fragmented markets
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regulatory ambiguity
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limited infrastructure
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trust deficits among stakeholders
In such environments, the central challenge is not always attracting capital. More often, it is sustaining the enterprise itself.
A Complementary Capability: Change Readiness
My research explores a complementary concept: Change Readiness.
While investor readiness focuses on preparing ventures to attract capital, change readiness focuses on the capabilities required to navigate uncertainty and sustain enterprises over time.
Change readiness emphasises three core capabilities:
- Customer orientation — the ability to remain closely attuned to evolving customer needs and adapt offerings accordingly.
- Collectivism — the ability to coordinate employees, partners, and stakeholders around shared goals.
- Commitment to impact — the persistence required to sustain ventures even when institutional conditions are unstable.
Where investor readiness signals credibility to external investors, change readiness reflects the internal capability to execute under uncertainty.
Why This Matters for Women Entrepreneurs
These capabilities appear particularly relevant when examining women-led enterprises.
Across many contexts, women entrepreneurs often build businesses through relational networks, customer proximity, and community embeddedness. They tend to maintain close engagement with customers, coordinate teams carefully, and sustain enterprises that support employees, suppliers, and families.
These capabilities are not always visible in traditional accelerator curricula, which emphasise investor-facing signals. Yet they may be precisely the capabilities that enable firms to survive and gradually expand employment.
In recent research comparing investor readiness and change readiness among African SMEs, investor readiness was strongly associated with firm performance. However, among women-led enterprises, change readiness showed stronger and more consistent relationships with both performance and employment growth.
This suggests that the capabilities women entrepreneurs frequently bring to their ventures may be particularly well suited to sustaining enterprises in complex environments.
Interestingly, change readiness may also function as a barometer for access to finance rather than simply its outcome. Investors often commit capital after entrepreneurs demonstrate the ability to build trust with customers, coordinate stakeholders, and execute reliably. In this sense, capital frequently follows demonstrated execution capability.
Lessons from Emerging-Market Ventures
Several well-known ventures illustrate how adaptive capabilities shape entrepreneurial success.
Kenya’s M-PESA succeeded not because it perfectly matched investor expectations at launch, but because the platform continuously adapted to how customers actually used mobile money.
South Africa’s Yoco grew by focusing intensely on the needs of small merchants rather than pursuing premature scaling.
Nigeria’s Flutterwave expanded by coordinating banks, regulators, and partners across complex institutional environments.
These ventures succeeded not merely by signalling readiness to investors, but by demonstrating readiness to navigate institutional change.
Rethinking Entrepreneurship Support
If change readiness plays such an important role in sustaining ventures and expanding employment, entrepreneurship support programmes may need to rethink how they define readiness.
Accelerators often prioritise pitch preparation, financial modelling, and investor presentations. Yet capabilities such as adaptive learning, relational coordination, and persistence under uncertainty may be equally important for long-term enterprise growth.
Developing these capabilities requires different forms of support — including mentorship, peer learning, and experiential problem-solving — rather than standardised training alone.
In this sense, the goal shifts from helping entrepreneurs look ready for investment to helping them build enterprises that endure.
Toward a Broader View of Entrepreneurial Capability
Economist Barbara Bergmann famously argued that economic inequality cannot be understood without examining the institutions that shape opportunity. A similar insight may apply to entrepreneurship.
If we want women-led enterprises to grow and create jobs, we may need to move beyond frameworks that focus solely on financial readiness and recognise the broader capabilities that allow entrepreneurs to operate in complex environments.
Women entrepreneurs around the world are already demonstrating powerful capacities for navigating uncertainty, building trust, and sustaining enterprises.
In an era defined by institutional disruption and rapid economic change, the most valuable entrepreneurial capability may not simply be readiness for investment.
It may be readiness for change.