Why Women-led Gaming Technology is the Way Forward
By Anvit Goyal, IMM Lead and Portfolio Analyst, LIVE Africa
Born in a cricket fanatic nation with more than 1 billion people playing the sport, you could surely guess where I’m from. If you failed to guess, it is India, I was no exception to the stronghold that the game has on fans from my country. I played cricket day in and out, and so did the majority of the 561,000 (2011) people living in my "small city." As I was growing up, so was technology. There were apps for almost anything and everything, including renting out a car. As a millennial and avid cricket fan, I always thought, why can't local cricket catch up with the innovation. Flashback to 2018 when I returned to India after having being deprived of playing my beloved sport for more than two years (this is the time I was busy attending the B-school in the United States). I set out to play cricket with some of the local kids where I learned about an app they were using to score and keep track of the match. After a little digging, I found out that a local person named Rani had taught herself coding to build the app product. The B-school ninja in me did a simple back of the hand calculation:
Rani cannot realize the potential business opportunity from the side project she undertook to complement playing cricket and she won't! Why?
The two primary reasons: firstly, women in technology historically have a harder time getting access to capital for their innovative products and secondly, she falls at the bottom of the pyramid, communities with limited access to resources and networks to develop, launch, and grow her tech-enabled business.
The figures are, to say the least, appalling. Globally, 92% of the top venture capital firms are led by men, and female-founded startups receive only 2% of the total funding, and in Africa only 9% of the startups are female-led. Research notes that 6:1 is the ratio of investments given to all-male startups to the investments given to women-led startups. Venture capitalists are also reluctant to explore the bottom of the pyramid market where around four billion people are located and make on an average less than $2 per day because it is difficult to gauge the efficacy of these ventures. Moreover, these capitalists use traditional methods of technology evaluation, which chiefly rely upon monetary and tangible aspects rather than also including the social impact aspect into consideration.
In 2015, the UN and many international governments embarked upon this journey to make the world a better place to live by adopting 17 sustainable development goals that present a $12 trillion business opportunity. There has been a link to technology and changing the world right from the renaissance period up to this date. Women-led technology firms experience 35% higher ROI than those that are led by men and women invest 90% of these earnings back to the community as compared to around 40% for men.
Through LIVE Africa, my team and I aim to tap into such innovations happening across developing and frontier markets and help more women find such exciting business opportunities that directly impacts the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. As aptly noted in the Harvard Business Review article “Cracking the Frontier Markets,” "The key to cracking frontier economies lies not in exploiting existing markets, although that may lead to some success. It lies in creating new markets that serve the billions of non-consumers unable to find a product or service to help them solve an important problem.” We at LIVE Africa will help both investors and entrepreneurs take this magical leap and that will propel you and the society! I aim to help more innovators like Rani realize the change they seek to achieve in the world.