What will Women Own?
We know women can build. The next question is how many will own at scale.
Dear Mr Elumelu and Alhaji Dangote,
At the WIMBIZ 25th Anniversary Conference last week, both of you spoke about the women who had shaped your lives and your understanding of business.
Mr Elumelu, you spoke about your mother, who ran a small restaurant and taught you some of your earliest lessons about cash flow, customers and resilience. You said you found it strange that anyone should still question whether women can lead African businesses. The evidence had been in front of you all your life.
Alhaji Dangote, you spoke about the remarkable women in your family, particularly your mother’s generosity and how her commitment to giving back shaped your own philosophy of wealth. WIMBIZ also quoted you as saying, “The most effective leaders in the world are women.” You spoke of women within your businesses who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and delivered outstanding results.
I found both accounts significant.
Here were two men who had built extraordinary enterprises, acknowledging the influence of women who understood business, responsibility and the creation of value.
These stories matter. But they also raise a question I believe we should now be asking much more seriously.
If we know women can build, what are we doing to ensure more women actually own?
I ask this not to diminish what either of you has accomplished in supporting women. Quite the opposite.
Mr Elumelu, your record through the Tony Elumelu Foundation is considerable. The Foundation has supported thousands of African entrepreneurs with seed capital, training, mentorship and networks. In its 2026 cohort of 3,200 entrepreneurs, 51 per cent are women. That is an impressive demonstration of what happens when opportunity is opened up and women compete on merit.
Your businesses also demonstrate a willingness to put women in positions of considerable leadership responsibility. From Dr Awele Elumelu, your co-founder and business partner, to the women leading companies across Heirs Holdings, you have moved well beyond simply advocating for women in business.
Alhaji Dangote, your challenge to women to think beyond trading and participate more substantially in manufacturing, processing and exports is equally important. Your efforts to widen access to share ownership in the Dangote Refinery offer an interesting example of how major African enterprises can open participation to a broader investor base.
There is already much to build upon.
But I want to take this conversation somewhere else.
What happens after women have proved they can build?
Consider the woman who started with modest capital and has spent fifteen years building a profitable manufacturing business. She employs people, pays taxes, supplies major corporations and has demonstrated that customers want what she produces.
She no longer needs another entrepreneurship workshop. She needs capital to acquire machinery, expand capacity, enter new markets or acquire a competitor.
Consider another woman who has spent twenty years growing an enterprise within a major corporate group. She has led teams, delivered profits, expanded markets and helped create substantial shareholder value.
She has a title. She earns a good salary. She may even sit on the board.
But does she have a meaningful stake in the wealth she has helped create?
These are different women facing different challenges. Yet both point to the same economic question.
How do we move from recognising women’s contributions to creating more pathways for women to participate in ownership?
In today’s technology sector, equity incentives and share options can enable employees to participate in the future value of the companies they help build. These arrangements are neither automatic nor appropriate for every business, but the underlying principle is worth examining.
The people who create enterprise value can also participate in its ownership.
Why should more established African businesses not examine similar possibilities, particularly for exceptional women whose commercial contributions have helped them grow?
And why should major investors not look more deliberately at women-owned businesses that have moved beyond the start-up phase and are ready for serious growth capital?
I am not proposing that equity should be given away simply because someone is a woman. Nor am I suggesting that every promising business deserves investment.
Capital must earn a return. Businesses must be well governed. Founders must understand valuation, dilution, shareholder rights and the obligations that come with external investment.
I have spent enough years building businesses to understand these realities.
But I also know that access to serious commercial opportunity is not distributed evenly. Who gets introduced to investors, invited into a consortium, considered for a strategic acquisition or given a serious hearing by an investment committee can make all the difference.
These decisions determine which businesses remain small, which ones scale, and ultimately who accumulates wealth.
Let me tell you both what we have begun.
Throughout September, I devoted this column to four questions that have increasingly occupied my thinking.
Where are the banks owned by women, the significant businesses women have built and taken public, the commercial buildings held substantially in women’s names, and the major contracts awarded to women-owned enterprises?
What struck me was not simply how few examples we could readily identify, but how difficult it was to establish the answers.
We have become reasonably good at counting women’s representation in leadership. We know how many women sit on boards, run institutions and occupy senior positions.
Nobody is systematically counting what women actually own. Who holds the equity, who receives the contracts, who controls the assets, and who allocates the capital?
And perhaps most importantly, what remains in women’s hands when value is created?
These questions are no longer simply intellectual.
On 16 October, I convened twelve women around a table to begin exploring what we might deliberately change over the next decade. Women who build businesses, invest, lead institutions and understand the workings of capital.
We called it Towards an Ownership Agenda 2036
We are beginning with three practical ideas.
BUY. Open more markets, contracts and commercial opportunities for credible women-owned businesses.
BACK. Identify and support promising women-owned enterprises capable of becoming significant institutions, connecting them to capital, markets, governance expertise and strategic partnerships.
BUILD. Strengthen women’s capacity to become sophisticated owners, investors and capital allocators, able to create, protect and transfer enduring wealth.
We are also beginning to identify a pipeline of established women-owned businesses with the potential to grow substantially through the right combination of capital, markets and institutional support.
Not another awards programme. Not another organisation that measures success by how many women attend its events.
The ambition is to make measurable progress towards a different ownership landscape by 2036.
And this is where I believe your influence and that of other major African business leaders could make an extraordinary contribution.
Mr Elumelu, one line from your WIMBIZ keynote particularly struck me:
“Advocacy got women into the room. Capital will get them to the head of the table.”
I agree.
And I believe capital can take us even further. Beyond getting women to the head of the table, it can help more women build, finance and own tables of their own.
Capital changes the nature of participation. It gives women the ability to invest, acquire, influence decisions and participate in the value they help create.
You also raised an even bigger question in your address. Who will own Africa’s growth?
Your answer was unequivocal: “And it will be Africans, and African women!”
That is a vision worth taking seriously.
Because women must not only be recipients of capital. They must increasingly become investors and capital allocators themselves.
Women investing alongside other serious investors. Women participating in acquisitions. Women holding meaningful shares in major African enterprises. Women influencing where capital flows and which businesses get built.
That is how ownership becomes an economic force rather than another empowerment slogan.
So here is my invitation to both of you and to the wider community of African business leaders.
What if, over the next five years, we deliberately demonstrated what commercially meaningful participation in ownership could look like for African women?
Not another symbolic commitment, but actual transactions and measurable outcomes.
Women-owned businesses are receiving growth equity because their numbers and prospects justify investment.
Established companies acquiring or investing in promising women-owned enterprises, with founders retaining meaningful participation in the value created.
Major corporations entering strategic joint ventures with women-owned businesses capable of delivering commercially.
Women-led suppliers are becoming significant participants in African supply chains, rather than remaining perpetually on the margins of major procurement opportunities.
And exceptional women executives having clearer pathways to equity participation in the enterprises they help build.
These are not acts of charity. They are commercial possibilities worthy of serious examination.
Imagine looking back five years from now and identifying the women-owned enterprises that became major regional players because they gained access to the right capital, markets and strategic partners.
The women who moved from being highly paid executives to meaningful shareholders. The women who participated in major acquisitions, built investment portfolios and began deploying capital into the next generation of African businesses.
That would be progress worth measuring.
And the responsibility does not rest with two businessmen, however influential.
It belongs to our banks, pension funds, private equity firms, family offices, corporate boards and investment institutions. It also belongs to women who have already built substantial wealth and have the capacity to invest in others.
We need an ecosystem that moves beyond preparing women for opportunity to enabling more women to participate in the ownership of productive assets and enterprises.
For decades, organisations such as WIMBIZ, alongside many others across Africa, have worked to ensure women are recognised, heard and represented in business and leadership.
A generation later, we have an opportunity to build on that foundation.
The women who inspired your journeys did not need anyone to convince them that they could build. They were already doing it.
Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay to them is to help create an economy in which more women can own the value they create, pass that wealth to the next generation, and become the investors who make other extraordinary businesses possible.
We have spent decades making the case that women belong in business.
The next chapter must be about women building and owning businesses of consequential scale.
Udo Maryanne Okonjo
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