I grew up in Soweto which meant that I was surrounded by high unemployment and people that don't have access to opportunities. What inspired me deeply was just the local tuck shop that would open up and serve a need in the community, and that was the way that the owners would feed their families.

Currently, it's not equal for women. So how can we make sure that they get the support that they need, as well as the early bets that they need in order for them to learn, to make mistakes, and to bring innovations into the market? That's what really drives me as a person - justice and equality within the space where I work. And it's translated into solving for those disparities between funding for men and women.

One that comes to mind is a lot of women articulating some of the biases that they experience throughout the investment process. You get women who get questioned a lot on if they have the right expertise or if they have the right character to be able to deliver on the solutions. The conversations are not about the business and whether the business has the potential to scale, but rather if they are the right fit for that. And I think a lot of it ties to how VC is made up around pattern recognition.

There's a start-up that I worked with in the agritech space and they've built this bespoke platform that can do livestock identification. She had a successful exit before, but not within the tech space and when I first met her, she mentioned some of the challenges around trying to raise that initial investment. There were a couple of people that were trying to take her for a ride, in terms of hitting on her in that process, as she was trying to raise from the local market. And there were also people that would tell her that she just didn't have the right experience.

Imposter syndrome is such an isolating experience because it takes away from the feeling of, "I deserve something". If you don't know that other people also feel that they don't deserve the things then that makes it a lot less isolating, less lonely and a lot more normal.

How can we make sure that the innovations that we're building for the future account for that changing dynamic, in the population? It can only be done if women are in the room and being funded to release these innovations into the market.

It all starts with the intention. As long as you really understand why diversity is critical and, for me, diversity is critical to fuel innovation in general. You cannot have innovation without diversity of thought and diversity of thought comes from the different types of personalities, the different experiences that you bring within a certain room.

So those would be two things - get clear on your priorities and make sure that you're getting validation from the right people, which are your customers. And then, secondly, make sure that you network, network, network and really just overcome the imposter syndrome that might make you feel like you don't belong in certain rooms.

I want to live in an Africa where, if you are an individual with the talent and the idea, you're able to get the support that you need to bring it to life regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic background. That is the world that I want to live in.

We Fund Women is a gender-lens investing community so we aim to do three things. Firstly, we want to amplify the stories of different women entrepreneurs across the continent by giving them the platform to talk about their journeys. Secondly, connecting capital allocators and people who can provide growth support to promising women with great innovations. Overall, what we're trying to do is leverage community in order to catalyse the move towards gender equality on our continent within the VC space.