With MasterCard Foundation estimating that an increased economic participation of young women could unlock up to US$287 billion in additional gross domestic product (GDP) - creating 23 million jobs across Africa by 2030 – a top banking executive has called on the continent to invest in women.
Addressing the two-day Standard Bank Top Women 2026 in Johannesburg, ending on Wednesday, Simone Cooper, head: business and commercial banking South Africa at Standard Bank Group, said a real inclusion of women in the economy could only be achieved through access to finance, education, technology, markets and leadership opportunities.
Cooper said key drivers of women empowerment should “become the norm, rather than the exception”.
Addressing delegates attending the gathering at the Sandton Convention Centre, Cooper said by 2030, 40% of the world's young people will be African – “creating an unprecedented opportunity to shape the future through talent, innovation and entrepreneurship”.
“That statistic tells us something profound: Africa's future is not decades away - it is already here.
“It is sitting in our classrooms, entering our workplaces, building businesses, developing new technologies and shaping communities,” she said.
Cooper called for the unlocking of women’s full potential, which she said was “more important to Africa's future prosperity”.
She said: “Investing in women is not simply a matter of inclusion, not only the right thing to do, but one of the smartest economic choices a continent can make. For Africa to achieve sustainable prosperity, accelerate innovation and remain globally competitive, women must be at the centre of its growth story.
“The challenge facing Africa is not a shortage of talent, ambition or ideas – we have those in abundance. Our challenge is converting potential into opportunity and opportunity into growth. When we talk about women's empowerment, we are not talking about a social initiative on the margins of economic development. We are talking about one of the most important drivers of Africa's future growth and competitiveness.
“From exceptional women to exceptional systems across Africa, we are surrounded by inspiring stories of women who have overcome barriers, built successful businesses, transformed industries and created opportunities for others.
“Those achievements deserve to be celebrated. If we are serious about amplifying women-led growth, we must ask ourselves a more fundamental question: why should exceptional success still require extraordinary resilience?”
Cooper said too often, “progress has relied on individual women overcoming systems that were never designed with them in mind”.
“The next chapter of Africa's growth must be different. Success should not depend on how many barriers women can break through. It should depend on how effectively we remove those barriers in the first place. Our ambition cannot simply be to produce a few extraordinary women, but must be to create extraordinary systems - enabling millions of women to succeed,” she said.
Quoting World Bank estimates in her keynote address, Higher Education and Training Deputy Minister Dr Nomusa Dube-Ncube, said between US$15 trillion and US$30 trillion in the global economy was forfeited in lost lifetime earnings and productivity, because millions of girls never completed 12 years of quality education.
“This should unsettle every boardroom, budget committee and every Cabinet on the African continent,” argued Dube-Ncube.
She maintained: “A woman who completes secondary education earns, on average, almost twice as much over her lifetime as one who does not. Closer to home, the numbers are just as sobering. McKinsey’s research tells us that Africa could add $316 billion to its GDP by simply having every country match the progress of the continent’s best-performing nation on gender parity. Foundations of the Bill of Rights hold that every South African, particularly every girl child, is entitled to dignity, equality and safety.
“But rights on paper are not enough while gender-based violence and femicide continue to steal our daughters, our sisters and our colleagues from us.”
She said an educated girl and later a skilled and economically independent woman, “has more power to walk away from harm - to negotiate her worth in a relationship or a boardroom - and to refuse a dependency that abusers so often use as a weapon against her”.
“Investing in girls' skills is also an investment in their safety, applying the principle of Batho Pele (people first) - putting people first to the very structure of our economy,” she added.
“For too long, chauvinism, dressed up as common sense, has told girls that engineering, coding, robotics and artificial intelligence are not spaces for them. This was never tradition. It was and remains a stereotype, having cost this country generations of talent we can no longer afford to waste.”
As the Fourth Industrial Revolution reshaped every workplace, the Department of Higher Education and Training was “deliberate about equipping girls and young women with digital, AI and robotics skills - from TVET colleges through to universities”.
This, she said, has led to technologies reshaping the economy being built by women, “not merely used by them”.
“None of this is the government's work alone. The private-public partnership on display at this very conference - Standard Bank, Telkom, KFC South Africa, MultiChoice, BP, Harmony Gold, Sanofi, Vouch and Bridging & Associates among them - has grown steadily over the years, a platform I have watched maturing.
“That growth must now be strengthened and deliberately moulded, moving beyond once-off sponsorship, towards sustained, multi-year commitments tied to measurable skills outcomes. It should translate into bursaries linked to work-integrated learning placements, mentorship that becomes sponsorship and procurement pipelines opening real contracts to women-owned enterprises.
“Government brings policy, scale and reach; industry brings capital, workplace exposure and markets. Neither is sufficient alone,” she said.