ASP Summit 2026 Reframes Africa’s Female Economy As Growth Infrastructure, Not a Niche Market

 By Ayodeji Ake

At the Africa Soft Power Summit 2026, executives from film, telecoms, fashion and retail make the case that the continent’s most undervalued growth engine is undercounted by design, not by accident. 

Leading African operators across film, telecoms, fashion and retail have made the case that the continent’s female economy remains chronically undervalued not because women are absent from economic activity, but because the systems used to measure, finance and structure that activity were never designed to see them. 

The discussion anchored The Female Economy: Africa’s Most Undervalued Growth Engine, one of the most closely watched panels at the Africa Soft Power Summit 2026 in Nairobi. The session brought together Rita Dominic, Co-Founder of The Audrey Silva Company; Rukky Ladoja, Founder and Creative Strategist at Dye Lab; Wandia Gichuru, CEO of Vivo Fashion Group; Mapula Bodibe, CEO of MTN South Sudan; and was moderated by Fiona Kemigisha, CEO of Khama Digital Content Hub.

Bodibe set the panel’s analytical frame by pointing to the structural gap between where African economic activity actually happens and where it is officially recorded. Much of the continent’s commerce, she argued, sits outside formal reporting systems, in markets, salons, cooperative savings groups, small enterprises and increasingly across digital and social commerce platforms.

“The majority of the continent’s economic activity takes place outside formal structures, across markets, savings cooperatives, salons and increasingly, social commerce platforms,” she said. Citing Rwanda, Bodibe noted that women account for roughly 47 per cent of formal employment, but their participation rises to nearly 80 per cent once informal economic activity is included. The implication, she argued, is that the continent’s measurement systems are systematically undercounting the female economy, which in turn shapes how capital is allocated, how policy is designed and how markets are sized.

“The reason this economic activity remains invisible is not that the people behind it are absent from the economy. It is that the systems in place were not designed to see them, and that needs to change,” she said.

Rita Dominic translated the systems argument into the creator economy, drawing on Nollywood’s evolution from the DVD era to streaming. African creators, she argued, have repeatedly built global visibility without securing the ownership structures that determine long-term value.

The DVD era, she noted, gave Nollywood continental and diaspora reach but left actors and filmmakers without meaningful control over the industry’s economics, which sat with marketers operating as gatekeepers and executive producers. Streaming has expanded global reach further, but has introduced a new ownership problem: data. While streaming platforms can measure audience size, geographic reach and viewing behaviour, creators rarely have access to the backend numbers that determine valuation, negotiation power and future commissioning.

For Dominic, the lesson across both eras is that visibility and ownership are different categories of value, and African creators must build for the second, not only the first.

“One thing the journey from DVD to streaming has made clear is that visibility is like currency. It can be spent. Ownership, owning the underlying work, is the asset that compounds over time,” she said. “Visibility gets you hired. Ownership gets you paid for life.”

Dominic added that the same principle applies across retail, influencing and other women-led businesses, where high social visibility often coexists with limited control over the warehouses, platforms, supply chains and IP that determine durable value.

Rukky Ladoja used Dye Lab to illustrate what it looks like to build a commercially serious business inside Africa’s female economy. The brand, she argued, was never conceived purely as a fashion label, but as a demonstration of how African creative businesses can build local capacity, identity, production infrastructure and consumer trust at the same time.

Dye Lab’s growth, she said, has shown that African consumers will pay for brands that integrate product, identity, community and local production, and that demand has, in turn, created economic opportunity for dyers, artisans and women working in informal production systems across the brand’s supply chain.

“Dye Lab is best understood as a case study in what it looks like to build an African brand. The question driving the work is how to create locally, in a way that is familiar, exportable and commercially compelling enough that consumers want to buy into it,” she said.

Wandia Gichuru closed the panel with the sharpest provocation directed at African investors. African consumers, she argued, are already powerful market actors whose spending decisions can build globally significant brands, but African capital markets have not yet been organised to back them.

Gichuru pointed to the global wealth created by the fashion industry, noting that the owners of brands such as Uniqlo, Zara and LVMH rank among the wealthiest individuals in their respective economies, and argued that African brands have the consumer base and cultural relevance to build at similar scale, provided the continent finances them.

“The continent does not lack capital. The question is why African brands are not being listed on African capital markets,” she said.

She added that the consumer side of the equation carries equal weight, framing African purchasing power as a form of investment in the continent’s brand and industrial future.

“Every consumer is also an investor. The decisions made at the point of purchase shape which African brands survive, scale and ultimately compete globally,” she said.

The Female Economy panel formed the analytical core of the Summit’s first conference day, which was powered by African Women on Board and held under the theme ‘Leadership, Inclusion & Market Power.’ An earlier session, ‘From Presence to Participation: African Women and the Economics of Access,’ examined the institutional and educational systems that determine whether women can move from visibility into ownership, leadership and capital, with contributions from Catherine Muraga of Microsoft Africa Development Centre, Tomiwa Aladekomo of Big Cabal Media, Eme Essien of Wealth for Impact and Wangari Kebuchi of Expertise Global.

Across both sessions, the day’s argument was direct. Africa’s female economy is not a soft or peripheral conversation. It is a question of how capital is allocated, how markets are measured, how brands are built and how value is owned. The panels reflected the central thesis of the Africa Soft Power Summit 2026, held under the theme Africa’s Compound Interest: Aligning Ecosystems of Finance, Creativity and Human Capital for Growth: that Africa’s next decade will depend less on the abundance of its talent or consumer base than on the systems that allow that activity to compound into lasting value for the continent.

The Africa Soft Power Group is the umbrella platform for three organisations with shared objectives: The Africa Soft Power Project, ASP Global and African Women on Board. Its mission is to mainstream African perspectives as a fundamental part of the global conversation across every aspect of life and economy.