In Senegal, access to finance for women entrepreneurs is very limited and often restricted to traditional financial mechanisms such as banks and microfinance institutions. Statistics show that 43.9% of Senegalese women entrepreneurs who borrow money do so from relatives and only 3.5% of them use financial institutions to access credit.

On top of the financial challenges they face, women entrepreneurs are burdened by the lack of platforms that provide them the knowledge and assistance necessary to grow their businesses.

As a result, women-owned businesses fail to scale, explaining the fact that over 99% of them operate at a small scale.

Cognizant of the financial, managerial and technical challenges that women entrepreneurs face, and the massive opportunity for growth that these challenges present, a group of Senegalese women in leadership came together to form the Women’s Investment Club (WIC) Sénégal.

In March 2019, WIC Sénégal launched WIC Capital, the first investment fund to target women-led companies in the francophone West African region.