One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is believing there’s only one way to fund a business. Nigeria shows us that’s not true. Alongside private investment, there are government-backed programmes, entrepreneurship initiatives and innovation platforms that help founders build before they raise significant investment. Programmes supported by SMEDAN, the Bank of Industry and the Nigeria Startup Act are examples of how the ecosystem is expanding beyond traditional venture capital. ✅ Today’s Action Instead of asking: “Who will invest in me?” Write down the answer to these three questions: 1. What milestone do I want to reach in the next six months? 2. What type of funding best supports that milestone? 3. What evidence can I show that my business is ready for that funding? Funding becomes much easier when your strategy is clear. Inside Gold Circle Academy, we believe founders shouldn’t just learn how to apply for funding they should learn how to become funding-ready, so the right opportunities naturally become a better fit.

Africa’s Highest Female Entrepreneurship Rates Meet a Stark Funding Gap and One Founder’s Eureka Moment. Africa boasts the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world. Yet women founders receive less than 2% of investment capital. That contradiction did not sit right with Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes. In a clip from The Builders Podcast by Nidacity, Rhodes recounts the research that led her to found Aruwa Capital Management one of the few women-owned and women-managed early-stage growth equity funds on the continent. “And we’re not getting any capital,” she begins. “There was less than 2% of capital going to female entrepreneurs. But then when I did some more research, I saw that Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world. So it didn’t make sense to me that Africa has four times the rate of female entrepreneurship than Europe, but we were getting less than 2% of capital.” The numbers only grew more puzzling the deeper she looked. If women founders were being shut out, what about women on the other side of the table — the ones writing the checks? I then dug deeper and saw that, okay, well, if female entrepreneurs are not getting capital, are female fund managers getting capital? And then I saw that there was less than 10 funds in the whole of the African continent of 1.4 billion people at the time that were female funded and female managed that had, you know, achieved the close of their fund.” That discovery produced what she calls her Eureka moment: none of the statistics would change until more women were both receiving capital and deciding where capital goes.“So I kind of had a Eureka moment and thought none of these statistics are gonna change if we don’t have women writing checks and if we don’t have female fund managers actually making the investment decisions. So cut the long story short, I approached my partners, you know, back in 2019, bought that firm out and rebranded to Aruwa Capital.” What began as a private realization became a deliberate act of institution-building. Rhodes, previously Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Syntaxis Capital Africa, acquired and rebranded the firm into Aruwa Capital Management, a Lagos-based growth equity and impact investment company focused on gender-lens investing across non-cyclical sectors in Africa.