Africa’s women entrepreneurs defy investor resistance

Tabitha Karanja is co-founder and chief executive of Keroche Breweries and one of Kenya’s wealthiest women. Her success, she says, proves that “a woman can do better than a man”, although she says she does not blow her own trumpet.

But while Karanja may be a confident operator now, she has had to face down doubters in the past. The daughter of a driver and a small-scale farmer who read for a diploma in business administration in Nairobi, Karanja started the brewery from nothing in 1997, after working in her husband’s hardware store in the town of Naivasha.

“I found there was a gap in the liquor market, then I came up with a product that is hygienically produced to international standards but is affordable: a fortified wine using local raw materials,” she says.

A decade later, Karanja set out to break the near monopoly of East African Breweries (EABL), which today is majority-owned by Diageo, one of the world’s largest spirits makers. One of Kenya’s largest companies by market capitalisation, EABL makes the ubiquitous Tusker beer, its leading brand in the country.

Karanja recalls that Barclays bank — now known in Kenya as Absa and one of the country’s top commercial lenders — also doubted her when she applied for a loan in 2006 to move from fortified wines into beer. She says the bank thought it might be a mistake. “But then I prayed and begged them, just to give me an opportunity to prove that I will get the market that I’m looking for. They gave me six months and, luckily enough, six months down the line I had already started getting into the market. I was able to pay [back] the loans after those six months.”

I prayed and begged the bank just to give me an opportunity to prove I will get the market

Keroche remains small in market terms; according to Statista, it had a 2 per cent share of Kenya’s beer market last year, compared with EABL’s 90 per cent. However, Keroche’s beer sales jumped from Ks456m ($4.2m) in 2000 to more than Ks3.8bn ($35.2m) in 2019. Keroche and EABL have even been in a legal dispute in recent years over the use of certain types of beer bottles and crates.

Karanja is emblematic of the progress African women have made in recent decades, in education and business. The female literacy rate rose to 58.88 per cent last year, according to Unesco. On average, 43 per cent of applicants to African business schools are women (the global figure for MBA programmes is 37 per cent, according to a 2016 report by the Graduate Management Admission Council).

Kenya has also seen an increase in women enrolling in tertiary education, from less than 1 per cent of the female population in 1984 to almost 10 per cent in 2018. According to a 2019 World Bank report, women in sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be in the labour force than in other regions, and almost 50 per cent of women in the non-agricultural labour force are entrepreneurs. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in which women are more likely than men to be entrepreneurs.

Kenya has done well in cultivating women-led businesses, partly because it has one of the most diversified economies in sub-Saharan Africa. This includes light manufacturing, tourism, banking and, most significantly, a technology ecosystem for young enterprises, known as Silicon Savannah. Two of the country’s top tech entrepreneurs are women: Njeri Rionge, co-founder of Wananchi Group Holdings, a home entertainment and internet service provider, and Dorcas Muthoni, chief executive of Openworld, a software company she founded in Nairobi.

Mary Muthoni (no relation to Dorcas) is chief executive of Women in Business Kenya, a network that promotes business opportunities, and is the first woman elected to the board of the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry. She believes aspiring female entrepreneurs in Kenya need a credible network and good mentoring if they are to succeed. “If I want to start a liquor factory today, the [go-to] person is Tabitha: she’s Kenyan, she’s local, she’s been there, has all the handles, and all that,” she says.

African women make men, maybe, look bad — because they’ve not supported women

But women still face constraints. Male-owned companies in Africa typically have more than six times the capital investment of female-owned enterprises. And female ownership of formal companies across Africa still lags behind that in Latin America. Women’s access to formal financial services has improved, but female entrepreneurs tend to control fewer assets than men and enjoy less generous credit lines. “Expanding the opportunities for female entrepreneurs through policies that foster gender equality would have a tremendous impact on Africa’s growth,” wrote Diariétou Gaye, a Senegalese vice-president of the World Bank, in 2018. “While both male and female entrepreneurs face such constraints as a lack of capital, women are specifically impacted by a number of obstacles, such as discrimination and the dearth of collateral.”

Nevertheless, some have succeeded. Today, Keroche has 300 employees, 45 of them female — a proportion Karanja is working hard to increase. “African women, having done, maybe, what I have managed to do, make men, maybe, look bad. Make them look bad because they’ve not supported women,” says Karanja. “And [men] don’t believe in [women]. [This is] a lesson that women can do better than men.

“You are in your own world alone. You have to wake up early to make sure that you will not fail people, fail Kenyans, fail the women looking up to you.”

Mary Muthoni says Karanja’s experience is typical: “At the top, it’s very lonely,” she says. “Even getting there or pushing to get there, you’ve got to pass so many hurdles.” She says women looking for Ks100m-Ks1bn ($920,000-$9.2m) of capital “are still struggling unless they have families and friends who are really helping them”. There are, however, many enterprise funds for women that will provide Ks10m of financing, she adds.

East African politics provides a long tradition of strong female leadership, too. In Kenya, Ngina Kenyatta, known as “Mama Ngina”, is the former first lady, mother of the current president and one of the nation’s most powerful political and business figures. In March, Samia Suluhu Hassan became Tanzania’s first female president, following the death of her predecessor, John Magufuli. She has been signalling that she will break with what many see as his toxic legacy. “Countries in Africa are embracing strong female leaders in government, the corporate and civil sectors,” says Amina Mohamed, Kenya’s culture secretary. “I am proud that women everywhere are united in this cause — making it easier for women to scale up to the highest positions and break glass ceilings”.

‘From grain to glass’: fostering inclusivity in big business

For all her success in the drinks industry, Keroche’s Tabitha Karanja has a secret to share with aspirant brewing executives: “I had never tasted beer before getting into the business.” Jane Karuku, though, was familiar with the taste before she took over as head of EABL, Kenya’s largest brewer. She has something to say to those who suggest brewing is an exclusively male domain: “Right, what’s a beer? It’s a business. Is it different from running cement, or chocolate, or clothes, or telecoms? It’s not.”

The group’s spirited new chief executive (above) continues: “You have to think about your top line, you have to think about your profitability, your costs, your people, the key drivers of your strategy, and other enablers, depending on what you’re trying to do.

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“If I had [the idea] that beer companies are the preserve of men, I would not have wanted to come here. I’m a mother, I’m a wife, I’m a sister and I’m a daughter. But I’m also a leader. They all come together. The day I think that this is not so much a brand for women, then I’d start undermining myself, because I’ll be imagining that men suddenly have a magic thing they can do when they’re running a brewery.”

Karuku, who studied food science and has an MBA from National University in California, is one of Kenya’s highest-paid executives. Before taking on her current role in December, she was responsible for the Kenyan arm, which represents 75 per cent of EABL’s business (it has smaller operations in Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi). Her approach to success is “inclusivity and diversity, from grain to glass”; almost a third of the company’s master brewers are women, as a result of a global diversity drive by owner Diageo.

Formerly a senior executive at Cadbury Schweppes and Telkom Kenya, Karuku has also played her part increasing gender diversity at EABL. “People are starting to appreciate that and not fighting it — I haven’t felt any backlash,” she says, as she roves round the Tusker plant in Nairobi, checking everything is “spotlessly clean”. By 2030, EABL aims to have a 50-50 gender split in its workforce (currently 36 per cent of employees are female.) “People keep asking me, ‘Have you been discriminated against?’ No, I haven’t. And probably it is because I blocked it, or didn’t even recognise it when it happened,” Karuku says.

She acknowledges the challenges women face in Kenyan business. “It is more complex, certainly for women, particularly in an African setting, in a Kenyan setting. First of all, from a cultural perspective, a woman is supposed to behave differently, is supposed to be that person who takes care of the family and stuff. A lot of people don’t believe you can do both,” she says.

“We had this bias that a corporate leader needs to wear a pinstripe suit to be seen as corporate. Things started changing when we began seeing more gentle leadership that is delivering and performing — and breaking that stereotype.”