Ecobank executive: Be bold in expanding your businesses

The Managing Director of Ecobank Kenya, Josephine Anan-Ankomah, has encouraged women entrepreneurs to be bold in expanding their businesses instead of playing it safe.

She said it was common for women entrepreneurs, especially in Africa, to be laid back in scaling up their businesses not because they had no potential but as a result of their deep-rooted fears of taking risks.

Mrs Anan-Ankomah cited the example of well-patronised food vendors who decide not to expand by opening other branches or sometimes running out of stock despite the high demand.

“Many women entrepreneurs simply do not consider scaling their businesses because the idea of expansion absolutely terrifies them. The fear of taking risks, managing bigger operations or accessing financing holds them back even when demand is knocking on their doors,” she said at the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg (AFG) Memorial Lectures in Accra last Thursday.

Such a situation, Mrs Anan-Ankomah stressed, had made many women “necessity entrepreneurs”, who focused on surviving, instead of becoming “opportunity entrepreneurs” who aimed at business growth and economic development.

“While their male counterparts confidently walk into banks and negotiate for capital to scale, many women continue to self-finance, limiting their ability to compete, expand, and dominate their industries,” she added.

Lecture

Mrs Anan-Ankomah, who is also the Ecobank Regional Executive for Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, was delivering the 2025 AFG Memorial Lectures organised by the University of Ghana.

The two-day lecture, on the theme: “Her Money, Her Power: Making Finance Work for Women”, sought to explore the challenges women faced in accessing finance, as well as the benefits of helping women’s businesses.

Mrs Anan-Ankomah, after delivering the lecture, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Laws (honoris causa) by the university in recognition of her outstanding contributions to banking and finance across the African continent.

The AFG Memorial Lectures was instituted by the University of Ghana in 1957 as a thought-provoking platform for personalities who have distinguished themselves in their respective fields.

Inhibiting factors

While acknowledging the need for women to be bold in expanding their businesses, Mrs Anan-Ankomah said certain factors limited women’s access to finance, curtailing their economic empowerment and advancement.

She mentioned some of the factors as educational barriers, the lack of financial literacy, the lack of trust among women in financial services, the failure of banks to make tailored products targeted at women, and a false sense of gender neutrality in financial services.

She observed that banks and other financial institutions had over the years failed to recognise the peculiar needs of women, and had rather adopted policies that treated men and women as being on the same level in terms of their financial experiences.

“We live in a world where loans require collateral that women do not have, where credit scores favour formal employment over entrepreneurial hustle, and where women’s banking behaviours are ignored,” she said.

According to her, the best solution to address such a problem was for financial institutions and regulators to implement policies that addressed the peculiar challenges that made it difficult for women to access financial services.

“That means collecting both demand-side and supply-side gender-disaggregated data, designing financial products that align with how women actually manage money, and ensuring that women’s voices are represented at every level of decision-making — from bank boardrooms to regulatory bodies,” she said.

Economic sense

Mrs Anan-Ankomah urged banks, financial institutions and regulatory bodies to appreciate the need to promote access to finance for women, saying it would not only ensure fairness but would also make economic sense.

“The financial sector is still treating women more as an afterthought rather than as a $5 trillion opportunity; yes, that’s how much closing the gender financing gap could add to the global economy,” she said.

“The data is clear: women are better borrowers, savers and investors. It is time, and in our interest, to stop ignoring them,” she added.

Women investors

The Ecobank Regional Executive said although studies had shown that women were better managers of money and better investors as compared to men, they were underrepresented in the investment markets.

“The lack of female investors directly correlates with the lack of funding for female entrepreneurs. It’s a vicious cycle: women don’t invest because they are not part of the financial ecosystem, and they are not part of the financial ecosystem because they are not investing,” she said.

On how to resolve such a challenge, she called for a deliberate attempt to cultivate female investors, adding that “we need more female angel investors, more women-led venture capital firms, and more gender-lens investment funds that prioritise financing women-led businesses”.