Africa’s femtech increase is actual. Its largest gaps say much more

For those who ever want a fertility clinic, you wouldn’t must do a lot analysis. IVF centres promote on billboards. Surrogacy labs occupy premium actual property in medical districts. These are seen, accessible, and more and more normalised elements of the healthcare panorama. 

Now, attempt to discover a specialist in persistent pelvic ache. Attempt finding a clinic that treats vaginismus or dyspareunia, situations that make intercourse painful or unimaginable for hundreds of thousands of ladies. 

The disparity isn’t unintended. It’s financial. And economics, at its core, is about values: what a society has determined issues sufficient to fund, construct, and maintain. 

Fertility is funded not as a result of it’s objectively extra necessary than ache administration, however as a result of we’ve determined, socially and culturally, {that a} girl’s means to breed is extra invaluable than her means to stay with out struggling. Lengthy earlier than buyers enter the image, society has already ranked what issues. That calculus is now embedded within the world femtech market.

The numbers inform a narrative if you happen to’re keen to learn it

International femtech funding has grown from $107 million in 2012 to $2.6 billion in 2024, in line with Statista. Preliminary estimates place 2025 as excessive as $8.5 billion. Despite the fact that femtech nonetheless accounts for simply 8.5% of whole world digital well being funding, the expansion suggests progress. Till you zoom into the distribution. 

Information from Dimensions AI, a world database of analysis perception, reveals that fertility and being pregnant seize over 74.24% of femtech funding, whereas menopause and breast most cancers have gotten solely 10.9% and 0.55%, respectively. Pelvic well being, endometriosis and PCOS stay nearly invisible. These uncared for areas exist in what Amboy Avenue Ventures calls “ghost markets”: huge swimming pools of unmet medical and industrial wants which might be functionally invisible to buyers. 

Endometriosis impacts an estimated 190 million girls globally, but funding for analysis and innovation lags many years behind much less frequent situations. Persistent pelvic ache is so undertreated that many ladies spend years biking by medical doctors, misdiagnosed, or instructed their ache is psychosomatic. The funding disparity isn’t about want. It’s about what enterprise capital finds legible, scalable, and investable. It’s extra comfy funding girls’s capability to breed than their proper to stay with out ache.

In Africa, the sample repeats

In Africa, the identical hierarchy seems. First in infrastructure, after which it trickles into funding. 

Halima Mason, the founding father of Sexual Wellness Holistically, has famous that girls usually interact the medical system solely within the context of copy, whereas issues about need, pleasure, or ache are managed privately. Assist exists in small pockets: a couple of therapists and counsellors, some progressive gynaecologists, and a restricted variety of pelvic physiotherapists, largely in main cities.

This infrastructure hole mirrors the funding hole. About 100 femtech startups function throughout Africa, but about 81% of people who have raised funding give attention to being pregnant and fertility. 

Startups like Grace Well being and Susu Well being have raised hundreds of thousands for fertility and maternal well being providers. BabyMigo has attracted grants to assist being pregnant care. 

Prior to now three years, there was an rising variety of femtechs launching throughout Africa. Most of it is because of stakeholders, each founders and buyers, recognising the industrial potential after the sector’s success in different areas. But, a lot of the buyers fund the elements they perceive: fertility and being pregnant. Ache, pleasure, and wellness stay unfundable as a result of they don’t match established narratives about girls’s worth. 

This displays what feminist economist Marilyn Waring noticed many years in the past: financial methods constantly undervalue girls’s wellbeing issues, as a result of they had been designed to reward productiveness. Medical historians have documented how girls’s our bodies had been excluded from medical analysis as a result of they had been seen as too advanced, too variable, and too pricey to check. Sadly, present femtech funding reproduces this. Areas of ladies’s well being which might be non-normative or tough to standardise stay underfunded, whereas fertility, which inserts present biomedical and financial narratives, attracts capital.

What this implies

This isn’t about whether or not fertility care issues. It does. However it’s deeply revealing that girls’s means to breed attracts much more consideration, infrastructure, and capital than girls’s means to stay with out ache. 

The problem for 2026 isn’t simply femtech’s progress, as progress alone doesn’t equal justice. It’s whether or not femtech will problem the ideologies that created these disparities, or just replicate them at scale. It’s which girls, which our bodies, and which types of struggling we’re keen to fund.

For founders, this implies recognising that “ghost markets” usually are not marginal issues, however proof of unmet demand created by historic neglect. For buyers, it requires interrogating their very own biases concerning the sort of options they’re extra desirous to fund, and why their funding priorities cease at copy. 

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Hannatu-Favour Asheolge Moses is a journalist and the founding father of TheSARAH Mission, a girls’s well being analysis and storytelling neighborhood.