Investing in Women in Technology
7 entrepreneurs leveraging frontier tech to improve the lives of children
A lot of ink has been spilt making a case for investing in women, even more so calling for equity and diversity in the tech sector. It's a forgone conclusion, investing in women is not just the right thing to do, it makes business sense and the outcomes can transform millions of lives.
Women and girls represent half of the world’s population and half of its potential, yet many face hurdles accessing the learning opportunities and investment they need to develop and scale innovative tech solutions. But this narrative is changing.
"Investing in girls and women in tech is not just the right thing to do but is a smart investment decision," said Kitty van der Heijden, Deputy Executive Director of Partnerships at UNICEF.
"According to a Forbes 2023 article, women-founded companies generate outsized social and financial returns. The Return on Investment (ROI) in diverse founders has been well documented. Companies with female founders generate, on average, a 35 per cent higher ROI and 12 per cent higher revenues than their male peers.
When girls and women are given the financial and entrepreneurial support they want and need, we can unlock an inventory of innovative solutions that can drive transformational change in creating a healthier, safer, greener and better society for all."
Organizations like Female Founders Fund, Case for Her and SoGal Ventures are showing leadership in addressing this imbalance. In line with this shared vision, UNICEF and partners are catalyzing intentional and dedicated investment to equip a diversity of women in tech with access to open-source technology and funding to develop and scale innovative solutions that have the potential to accelerate progress toward global development goals.
The philanthropic UNICEF Venture Fund is a unique model for equity and inclusivity in frontier tech for social impact. It makes equity-free financial and mentoring investments in open-source solutions that accelerate results for children, with an intentional lens on entrepreneurs in emerging markets and female-led and female founded startups.
Over the last decade, the Fund has identified, piloted, and grown 149 open technology solutions from tech start-ups and UNICEF Country Offices across 87 UNICEF countries, reaching over 101 million people among whom 34.9 million are children.
Of the tech start-ups, 43 per cent are either female founded or led -vastly over performing impact investing industry averages of 1.9 per cent (as of 2022)- and they account for 64 per cent of the total amount of follow-on funding raised.
With about 40 per cent of solutions expanded to new countries and 64 per cent of start-ups already generating revenue, the Fund is proof of the value of inclusive, decentralized, and locally driven innovations, and helps shape global tech and industry policy through practice.
"Investing in gender equality is investing in a better future. Ensuring women in technology have access to funding and technical support drives impact through innovation." Ville Tavio Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, Finland.
Together with its partners, many more Fund investees around the world can receive support with their game-changing solutions.
The Fund’s female founders and leaders, whose companies have collectively reached 18 million beneficiaries, 11 per cent of them children, are building a global community of problem solvers growing local markets.
“Sweden is proud to host and support UNICEF’s global Office of Innovation. I appreciate how the UNICEF Venture Fund unlocks strategic partnerships in frontier tech. This is a great example of how philanthropic funding can align with private enterprise to make an impact globally. Investing in women entrepreneurs from emerging markets is simply good business,” said Mr Johan Forssell, Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, Sweden.
Learn more about some of the Fund’s founders and progress in acknowledgement of the importance of investing in a geographically diverse network of female leaders in technology.
Amy Fehilly is the co-founder at Eyebou (UAE), a company developing a solution using AI for eye-screening children to detect vision disorders.
“At Eyebou, we are using technology to make eyecare accessible and affordable around the world, even in areas with low connectivity. We have built a vision screening tool which can detect a variety of vision and eye health-related issues using only a smartphone app" Fehilly said.
Eyebou started its journey collaborating with SOS Children’s Village and UNICEF Colombia to screen the eyes of over 5,000 children in foster care. Of these children, 60 per cent had never seen an optometrist. The tool aided the detection of visual acuity and strabismus in over 45 per cent of the children screened.
Eyebou represents Fehilly’s commitment to merging healthcare expertise with technological advancements for equitable access to health services.
Hyma Goparaju, PhD, is the co-founder of Avyantra (India), a tech start-up that developed a machine learning tool to help with early risk assessment of neonatal sepsis and treatment decisions.
"Neonatal infections account for nearly 33 per cent of newborn deaths in India, and while preventing deaths such as these is possible through provision of quality healthcare, many mothers and children in rural areas often fall victim due to the lack of adequate health infrastructure. Our platform aims to address this gap by aiding early diagnosis of neonatal sepsis through artificial intelligence," Goparaju said.
Through a pilot with a government hospital in Hyderabad, over 1,800 babies and 1,000 mothers have received AI-enabled neonatal sepsis risk screening and testing.
Judith Okonkwo is the visionary founder of Imisi 3d, a pioneering virtual reality (VR) company based in Nigeria. With a background in architecture and a passion for technology, Judith has been at the forefront of promoting immersive technologies in Africa. Her journey began with the realization of VR's potential to revolutionize various impact sectors, from education to healthcare. As part of the Venture Fund's largest investment cohort to date, Imisi 3D explores how to best develop educational content design according to curriculum needs and connectivity constraints of schools in Nigeria.
“Imisi means ‘inspiration’ in Yoruba - and that is what’s possible with these technologies, that you can inspire, that you can do it in multiple dimensions and all the possibilities that come with that,” Okonkwo said.
Young entrepreneur Kavindya Thennakoon, age 28, is the co-founder and Head of Product at Tilli (Sri Lanka), a start-up that has a developed game-based, AI-driven social-emotional learning tool for 5- to 10-year-olds. To date, Tilli supports over 15,000 beneficiaries, including learners, parents and teachers.
"Developing as open source helped us adopt a stronger community-centered approach...we now break down our features into stand-alone modules that can be reused and repurposed by educators, game designers, and content creators interested in building or measuring social-emotional learning skills,” Thennakoon said.
Nompilo Matsebula is Head of Customer Success at eSuSFarm, an agri-fintech startup that specializes in tracking and providing advanced agricultural statistical data to smallholder farmers to increase their productivity, market share and credit access, contributing to the overall efficiency of the agri-value chain.
“eSuSFarm is more than a platform, it’s a catalyst for transformative change, technological empowerment and inclusion. We’re reshaping agriculture by empowering smallholder farmers, including women, to become beacons of sustainable growth in the digital age,” Mtsebula said.
Snjezana Gomilanovic is the CEO and co-founder of Om3ga in Serbia, a start-up spearheading a deep learning speech-to-text solution, Daktilograf, for Slavic languages. Among the 350 million Slavic speakers worldwide, 14 million suffer from hearing loss conditions. Existing speech-to-text solutions can help children and young people overcome barriers in their education but are often inaccessible in less digitally competitive countries.
“Our speech-to-text solution can be used as a conversation-facilitating software, learning aid, or education assistant during online classes and in integrated classrooms. By becoming open source, we are giving the opportunity to others to build on top of our solution and develop similar products that will help the disabled community,” Gomilanovic said.
Stephanie Sy, CEO of Thinking Machines (Philippines), founded the company upon returning home from Stanford and roles at companies including Google in San Francisco. Recognizing gaps in data science in her home country, in 2015 she embarked on an entrepreneurship journey to empower communities.
"Data gives people who come from very different backgrounds and experiences a common ground on which to stand," Sy said.
Today, her team of 170+ with 67 per cent female leadership specializes in AI and geospatial datasets for climate and development. In collaboration with UNICEF, Thinking Machines created AI for Development, which helps democratize data to empower decision-makers and duty-bearers in low-resource contexts to carry out interventions in many sectors.
At a time when the African venture capital ecosystem represents less than 2 per cent of the global market, and with projections revealing that Africa and South Asia will have 50 per cent of the world’s youth by 2050, bolder and more ambitious efforts are required to diversify capital flows to ecosystems with the potential to deliver transformative technology solutions.
Over 10 years, with support from its founding partners - the Government of Finland, Takeda, the Ethereum Foundation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and championed by the Government of Sweden, the UNICEF Venture Fund has been committed to closing equity gaps between regions, genders and private sector interests.
In the decade ahead, the Fund aims to expand its geographical frontier beyond the venture capital spotlight, invest in young frontier tech entrepreneurs and underrepresented founders in emerging markets, and increase diversity in technology. Through the Venture Fund, UNICEF will continue to shape global technology development demonstrating how innovation can be inclusive, equitable and open.
