Women and E-commerce in Africa

The rapid digital transformation underway in Africa has the potential to have an equally transformative impact on women entrepreneurs. Although Africa boasts a higher incidence of women entrepreneurs compared to men, women-owned (WO) businesses across the continent tend to be smaller, have lower average sales, and have fewer employees. The exponential growth of e-commerce in Africa presents an opportunity to close gender gaps by opening more markets to WO enterprises. Advances in disruptive technologies do not always translate into advances in gender equality, and to date, there is limited research that has investigated women's participation or their success on e-commerce platforms. This report seeks to address this knowledge gap with the first large-scale, sex-disaggregated analysis of e-commerce sellers in Africa and to shed light on the following key questions: (1) how are women entrepreneurs participating and performing in e-commerce?; (2) what are the opportunities and challenges for women entrepreneurs selling on e-commerce platforms?; and (3) is there a business case for e-commerce platforms to invest in women entrepreneurs? To answer these questions, the research team conducted in-depth interviews with sellers, as well as global and regional e-commerce experts; undertook surveys of representative samples of men and women sellers in Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Nigeria; and conducted an analysis of data from Jumia, one of the region's largest e-commerce platforms