Khadijat Abdulkadir on Supporting Female Tech Entrepreneurs

Khadijat Abdulkadir is the founder of Digital African Woman, a social enterprise that develops and supports female-led tech start-ups across Africa and the diaspora.

“One of the key issues start-ups face is training and funding, and access to an ecosystem,” said Abdulkadir. “You come out of college, you have a business idea, but you don’t know what you need to make it reality. How do you develop your idea to make sure it’s investment consumable; how do you pitch correctly, design your prototype, develop your business model, make sure investors are interested in what you have to say? That’s what we focus on for startups, to make sure they have the tools, training and confidence to make sure their business gets heard.”

In the following video, Abdulkadir explains Digital African Woman (0:10), discusses the main challenges facing start-ups (0:55) and how to navigate between charity and business when pitching for funding (1:30), and shares her experience of adapting a pitch to show how sustainability makes business sense (2:15):

Digital African Woman will hold a conference tomorrow (Wednesday 21 September) at Eggsplore in Brussels focusing on these issues, and will participate in The Pitch challenge at the European Parliament on the 22nd of September. For more details, visit their website.