Picture this: a woman living in the rural parts of the Republic of Congo builds a small business selling goods online. She’s smart, she’s driven, she’s got a product people want. But she’s stuck: no smartphone budget, no digital literacy training nearby, and a banking system that doesn’t quite know what to do with her. Multiply her by tens of millions across the continent, and you start to see the actual size of the problem the UN just tried to put a number on.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, through its Technology, Innovation, Connectivity and Infrastructure Division, has officially launched “Fostering Digital Entrepreneurship Among Women in Africa”, a regional project targeting Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Namibia, and the Republic of Congo.
The initiative responds to persistent structural barriers limiting women entrepreneurs’ access to digital skills, financial services, and online markets, while also addressing gaps in enabling policy and regulatory environments. It runs on a dual-track approach: train the women entrepreneurs directly while also building capacity among the policymakers who shape the rules they operate under.
The numbers on paper: more than 1,000 women entrepreneurs are expected to benefit through digital literacy and financial management training, alongside more than 200 policymakers and government officials engaged through workshops and policy dialogue. Across the four countries, the project will deliver eight national workshops, one regional training programme, an online learning module, and study tours. It’s a four-year project, running through 2029.
Why does this matter, and why the numbers behind it matter more? This project didn’t appear in a vacuum. Sub-Saharan Africa recorded one of the widest mobile internet gender gaps globally at 26%, according to GSMA’s Mobile Gender Gap Report 2026, and that gap is even sharper in rural areas, where women are two to three times less likely to access mobile internet than their urban counterparts.
Republic of Congo, one of the four countries in this project, is a stark example: the gender gap there tops 20 points, with 25% of women having internet access compared to 47% of men. That’s not a training problem alone; it’s affordability, device ownership, and structural exclusion stacked on top of each other.
Zoom out further, and the World Bank’s own research on sub-Saharan Africa finds men are roughly 60% more likely than women to be able to perform at least one basic ICT-related task. That’s the real target this ECA project is aiming at: not just getting women online, but getting them online with enough skill to actually run a business on it.
For Ethiopia, Namibia, Burkina Faso, and Congo specifically, this means the difference between women’s digital entrepreneurship staying informal and cash-based, or becoming a real, trackable contributor to national digital economies, which matters even more as African governments push financial inclusion and e-commerce agendas.
Where we raise eyebrows is over 1,000 women entrepreneurs, across four countries, over four years. That’s roughly 250 women per country, spread across four years of implementation. Compare that to the scale of the actual gap: hundreds of millions of women across the continent locked out of meaningful digital participation and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable fast.
This isn’t a knock on the intent. It’s a flag on the framing. “Regional initiative” language tends to suggest continental scale, when what’s actually being delivered here is a closely scoped pilot with a policy-capacity layer attached. The first deliverable, notably, is a six-month assessment study in each country before any real training rollout begins, which is sensible programme design, but also means the “launch” headline is really the launch of a launch.
The taskforce structure and multi-stakeholder coordination model are also classic UN-agency scaffolding, good for accountability on paper, historically slow in practice. Four years is a long runway for a project that starts with an assessment phase.
This initiative is targeting the right problem: Africa’s gender digital divide is real, measurable, and economically costly, but 1,000 beneficiaries across four countries over four years is a research pilot dressed up as a regional solution. If ECA wants this to matter beyond a WSIS Forum press cycle, the real test is whether the policy playbook this generates in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Namibia, and Congo actually gets picked up and scaled by national governments after 2029, not the training numbers themselves.
Note: image has just been used to support the article
