I recently read that South Africa’s Women’s Month generates more articles, panels, and keynotes on women in business than any other period in the calendar year and then, with the reliability of a tide going out, the conversation recedes, the stages are packed away, and the economy returns to its default settings. This observation is not cynical. It is worth sitting with. Because the woman being celebrated in August did not start her business in August. She started it in February, or in a difficult November three years ago. She has been building quietly, without a programme or a panel, and the question that August should be asking but rarely does, is what the other eleven months look like for her.

The data offers a useful starting point. According to Mastercard’s 2025 research on women entrepreneurs in South Africa, 57% of South African women identify as entrepreneurs surpassing the regional average of 51% across the EEMEA bloc, 89% of Gen Z women identify entrepreneurship as a preferred career path. A further 71% express interest in starting their own business. These are not the numbers of a population waiting to be convinced. They are the numbers of a population that has already decided and is navigating, largely without adequate support, the distance between the decision and the sustainable business.

“The entrepreneurial spirit among women is strong and growing, with younger generations leading the way.” – Mastercard, 2025. The data agrees. The infrastructure has not caught up.

What Women’s Month tends to do well is visibility. The profiles, the panels, the media features, these serve a real function. They tell younger women that this is possible, that it has been done, that the road exists even when it is not yet paved. Visibility matters. But visibility without infrastructure is a kind of beautiful inefficiency. The woman who is inspired in August and then encounters, in September, the same undercapitalised, overburdened, under-mentored reality as the woman before her, has been seen without being served.

The gaps are well-documented and frustratingly stable. Funding remains the primary barrier, cited by 44% of South African women entrepreneurs in the same Mastercard study, followed closely by lack of financial resources at 41%. These are not abstract problems. They are the specific, recurring, month-by-month challenges of trying to sustain a business when the systems designed to support it were not built with your specific circumstances in mind. The collateral requirements of formal lenders. The programme hours that assume you have no care responsibilities. The mentorship networks that connect you to other women in the same situation rather than to the buyers and investors who could change your situation.

Female ownership of informal enterprises in South Africa grew from 40.4% in 2017 to 42.3% in 2023, according to Statistics South Africa. This is meaningful progress; slow, steady, and largely unacknowledged in the conversations that happen in August. The women driving this increase are not waiting for a month in their honour. They are operating through load-shedding and late payments and care burdens and markets that do not always take them seriously. They are building, with whatever is available, in a system that has not yet decided how seriously to take what they are building.

What August can do or what it should be used for, beyond the celebration, which is warranted and necessary is to force the harder accountability questions. Not “how many women-owned businesses exist?” but “how many survived their third year, and what made the difference?” Not “how many women attended the entrepreneurship programme?” but “how many of them accessed capital within twelve months of completing it, and through which channel?” Not “do we support women entrepreneurs?” but “does our support reach the women who need it most, in the places where they actually operate, at the time in their business journey when it would actually matter?”

The woman who was already running a business before August came around does not need a month. She needs a system that behaves in March the way it performs in August with interest, with investment, and with the specific, unglamorous work of making her business more likely to survive and scale. August is a good time to make that commitment. The test of whether it was made sincerely is whether anything is different by the time the following February arrives.

Londani Mpharalala, Research and Impact Coordinator at 22 On Sloane