What African women's sports can learn from the NCAA ⛹🏾‍♀️

📺 It’s official : the NCAA Women’s Finals brought more eyeballs than the NCAA Men’s Finals (18 million Vs 14 million - not by a small margin either).

💰The wave of investment in women’s sports - which is so well described in Jason Notte’s article for ADWEEK is paying off and more brands are bound to join the table by pledging equal spend on women’s athletes and women’s sports championships. Investing in women’s sports is about far more than commercial returns : studies have proven the direct correlation between the practice of sports at an early age and women’s advancement in their careers.

🌍Africa’s sports industry needs to learn to become as inclusive.

Our sponsorships schemes may not immediately reproduce the US models (which is heavily media-focused), there are innovative ways that brands and institutional investors who make commitments for women, can help support the growth of girls and women’s sports and ensure that our key competitions are taking place : as of today, we still do not know if the Women’s African Cup of Nations will take place as originally planned this year (a travesty - as aptly put by Osasu Obayiuwana in The Guardian)

We are missing an opportunity here as African women are already making history in sports.

🇿🇲 This year, Barbra Banda and Racheal Kundananji from the Zambia joined the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) at record-breaking transfer levels. We should not miss out on the opportunity to have them become hero figures for girls and young women across the continent.

There are a few that get it : Mchezo Limited’s recently announced sponsorships deals have covered both the men and the women divisions of leagues and federations.

But we could do more…

The African Development Bank Group’s AFAWA created in 2015, recently reached the milestone of USD 1 billion of approved lending for Africa Women SMEs leaders as an effort to bridge the financing gap that African women entrepreneurs face - we could imagine a facility that supports exclusively girls and women’s sporting associations and competitions : why invest only in today’s entrepreneurs when we could allocate funding in the future entrepreneurs by providing them with the opportunity to discover and play sports ?

⛹🏾‍♀️