Femtech in Africa: The Menstrual Health Innovation the World Needs to Know About.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

We live in a world where challenges and solutions are no longer confined by geography. The most interesting innovation in women's health right now is not all happening in Silicon Valley or in London. A significant amount of it is happening in sub-Saharan Africa — built by founders who understand the context from the inside, solving problems that have been invisible to the markets that have historically controlled capital and attention.

I want to use this piece to bring some of that innovation into view.

The context

One in ten girls across sub-Saharan Africa misses school because she cannot access menstrual products. Period poverty is not an abstract statistic — it is a direct barrier to education, to economic participation, and to the kind of long-term financial resilience that the gender gaps in wealth and pension savings ultimately trace back to.

The global femtech market is growing, but Africa accounts for only around 2% of it. That is not because the need is smaller. It is because the capital has not followed the need. UNICEF's first global Femtech Call received over 1,100 submissions from 85 countries — more than half from Africa — demonstrating the depth of innovation that exists and has been underrecognised and underfunded.

What is emerging is a set of solutions that are designed for African realities — for limited data budgets, for language diversity, for the specific health conditions that disproportionately affect African women, and for the social and cultural contexts that shape how health information can be accessed and used.

Eight innovators worth knowing

These are the companies I find most compelling in this space.

BABYSTEPS Health Technologies is an AI-powered platform predicting pregnancy risks and offering personalised maternal healthcare solutions. In a context where maternal mortality rates remain among the highest in the world, early risk detection is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between life and death.

Grace Health has over 1.3 million users across sub-Saharan Africa and provides reproductive health tracking and access to care through a platform that works via Facebook Messenger — deliberately designed for women with limited data access and older devices. The decision to meet women where they already are, rather than asking them to adopt a new app, is a customer design insight that many Western femtech companies have missed.

Hermplify is working to empower 200 million underserved African women and girls through AI-driven education and financial inclusion. The explicit connection between women's health knowledge and financial outcomes is exactly the kind of integrated thinking that I believe the sector needs more of.

Mara Scientific's Antenatal HMIS is a health management system improving antenatal care through more efficient data collection and service delivery — the kind of operational infrastructure that makes other innovations possible.

Mariam Seba Factory produces reusable menstrual pads that cost 90% less than disposables and last up to two years. The environmental case and the economic case point in exactly the same direction — and the solution is designed to work for women who cannot access or afford conventional period products.

Sanicle is focused on transforming women's workplace wellbeing, with flexible menstrual health options designed for employers who want to support their workforce properly. The workplace angle is one I care about deeply — and it is encouraging to see it being addressed as a distinct market with specific needs.

SHE — Sustainable Health Enterprises — uses banana trunks to create affordable, eco-friendly pads, reducing costs by 65% and supporting local farmers. A business model that is simultaneously improving health access, supporting agricultural livelihoods, and reducing environmental impact.

What this tells us about innovation

What strikes me most about these businesses is that they are not applying existing solutions to African markets. They are designing from the constraints — from limited infrastructure, from specific cultural contexts, from the particular health challenges that disproportionately affect African women — and building solutions that would not have emerged from more comfortable starting points.

A recent analysis of the African femtech ecosystem found that 17 of the 28 confirmed femtech startups on the continent are focused on maternal health — a direct response to the continent's maternal mortality rates. The market is shaped by the need, not by the preferences of investors in markets where maternal mortality is not a daily reality.

There is a lesson here for femtech and women's health innovation more broadly. The solutions that reach the most people are not always the most technologically sophisticated. They are the ones that are designed most honestly for the people who need them — that start from the constraint, not the ideal, and that treat genuine accessibility as a design requirement, not an afterthought.

The work happening across Africa in women's health is not a secondary story. It is some of the most important innovation in the sector. It deserves the attention, the capital, and the cross-sector collaboration that it has not yet fully received.