Women-owned businesses accounted for 36 per cent of Moniepoint’s MSME loan portfolio in 2025, highlighting the fintech’s growing focus on closing the financing gap facing female entrepreneurs.
Sophia Ukoni, Lead, Market Research at Moniepoint Inc., disclosed this at the 2026 Women Entrepreneurs & Executives in Tech Summit (WEETS), where she presented a paper on the company’s support for women-owned businesses.
According to Ukoni, Moniepoint provided more than $700 million in loans to MSMEs in 2025, with women-owned businesses receiving 36 per cent of the portfolio.
She said the figure was above the industry benchmark of between 15 per cent and 25 per cent, while lending to women-owned businesses grew by more than 300 per cent during the year.
Ukoni added that 62 per cent of women surveyed received their first formal business loan from Moniepoint.
Despite the increased lending, she said women-owned businesses continue to face significant financing constraints.
“Women hire more and repay more, yet they earn less and borrow less,” Ukoni said.
She noted that women own one in three businesses in Nigeria, accounting for 33 per cent of the country’s MSMEs and 35 per cent of informal businesses.
Women-owned businesses also recorded a lower loan default rate, with defaults among women borrowers 2.5 times lower than the baseline for men, according to data presented by Ukoni.
However, women are only half as likely as men to obtain loans above N1 million, she said.
Ukoni attributed the financing gap to factors including unconscious bias among lenders, limitations on asset ownership and inadequate awareness of available funding opportunities.
She said Moniepoint uses transaction data generated by businesses on its platform to assess their creditworthiness, reducing reliance on traditional collateral and extensive paperwork.
“We lend based on how a business actually performs, not on what it owns or who owns it,” she said.
Ukoni said improved access to credit could enable women-owned businesses to expand, create jobs and contribute more to their communities.
She added that 39 per cent of women-owned informal businesses employ staff, compared with 36 per cent of male-owned informal businesses.
“Women aren’t a charity case. They are the business case,” Ukoni said.
