AXIAN Group and the African Development Bank launched a major women’s financial inclusion programme on September 2 in Antananarivo, Madagascar, aiming to expand access to finance and business support for more than 34,000 women led enterprises across five African countries. The programme is backed by two African Development Bank initiatives specifically built for this kind of gap, the Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa initiative and the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, and it targets one of the most persistent constraints facing women owned businesses on the continent, limited access to finance.
The scale of that constraint is worth stating plainly. Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship anywhere in the world, and yet women entrepreneurs across the continent still face an estimated $49 billion financing gap, a striking mismatch between how many women are actually starting and running businesses and how much capital the financial system makes available to them once they do.
It is worth being precise about how the programme’s numbers actually break down, since the headline figure covers only part of what is being launched. The initiative runs as two complementary components rather than a single flat commitment. The first component provides tailored digital financial products and services directly to 34,000 women led micro, small and medium sized enterprises, specifically in Madagascar, Tanzania and Senegal. The second component is broader in reach but different in kind, delivering financial literacy, digital skills and entrepreneurship training to a further 25,000 women across five countries, adding Togo and Comoros to the same three markets. Combined, the programme touches well over 50,000 women across five countries once both components are counted separately, even though most coverage understandably leads with the single 34,000 figure tied to direct financial products.
Implementation runs through AXIAN Group’s existing digital financial services platforms, Mixx and MVola, working in partnership with local operating companies in each participating country to combine regional expertise with country level execution. The programme leans specifically on mobile money infrastructure, digital lending tools and alternative credit assessment methods, the kind of technology built to evaluate creditworthiness for entrepreneurs who have never had a formal bank lending history to draw on, which is precisely the gap that has kept so many women owned businesses locked out of conventional financing in the first place.
Erwan Gelebart, CEO of AXIAN Digibank and Fintech, framed the underlying problem clearly, arguing that the real barrier for African women entrepreneurs was never entrepreneurship itself, since millions of women are already running successful businesses, but rather access to finance, digital tools and genuine opportunities for growth. Melissa Basque Roux, who coordinates the African Development Bank’s AFAWA initiative, echoed that framing, describing women entrepreneurs as central to Africa’s economic transformation even as too many still face barriers to the finance, digital tools and business support needed to actually grow.
This isn’t the first time the African Development Bank has backed AXIAN specifically, and understanding that history helps explain why this programme launched at this scale rather than as a smaller pilot. In January 2025, the Bank approved a $160 million senior corporate loan to expand digital connectivity and financial inclusion across nine African countries, a package that included dedicated funding for 22,000 women entrepreneurs in Madagascar specifically. This new programme reads as a direct continuation of that relationship rather than a first time partnership, extending an existing commitment into new countries and a considerably larger combined reach.
For a continent where women already lead a disproportionate share of small business activity relative to the financing they can actually access, a programme built specifically around mobile money and alternative credit scoring, rather than requiring the traditional collateral and banking history conventional lenders demand, is a genuinely practical response to a well documented problem. Whether it meaningfully narrows a $49 billion gap remains to be seen, but reaching more than 50,000 women across five countries through one coordinated programme is a considerably larger attempt than most financial inclusion initiatives manage on a first run.
