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You Can Be the Economy and Still Own None of It

Writer: Lerato Mphaka
Lerato Mphaka
Sep 3
6 min read

In 2020, the LM Foundation ran Letsibolo — a fully-funded design-skills cohort for pre-university school-leavers, mostly young Basotho women. We taught them to design. Logos, social templates, layouts, brand kits. Within a year, a number of them were producing real work: paid gigs through the interactive design foundation in Switzerland, small business branding, content for local pages that had actual followings.


I was proud of that outcome for longer than I should have been.


It took me a while to notice the pattern underneath it. These young women were creating constantly — and almost none of them owned anything they made. The logo belonged to the client the moment it was delivered, with no license, no usage terms, no residual claim. The social templates lived inside a client's Canva account, not theirs. The content that built a page's following sat on Instagram, attached to somebody else's handle. They had the skill, the output, and the portfolio screenshots. They did not have a single asset that was legally or structurally theirs.


I have written about this before, from the other side. Issue 01 was about discovering, at 84,000 followers, that I had built something valuable on land I did not own. That essay assumed a starting point most readers share: you have already made the thing, and the open question is whether the platform underneath it is yours. Letsibolo forced an earlier question. What if the gap opens before the platform question even arrives — at the moment of creation itself, before there is a business to platform at all?




The scale of what's being created


Africa's creative sector has generated more than $58 billion in revenue since 2019 — nearly 4% of sub-Saharan Africa's GDP — and accounts for 8.2% of jobs in the region, according to research the Mastercard Foundation conducted with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). The Foundation projects that by 2030, Africa could be producing up to 10% of the world's creative goods exports, worth roughly $200 billion. Women are not sitting at the edge of that economy. Across Collabstr's global influencer marketplace of more than 50,000 creators, women make up 79% of Instagram influencers, 76% on TikTok, and 69% on YouTube — the visible creative labor an entire industry monetizes.


Yet the same Mastercard Foundation and ICRW research is blunt about where that labor lands. Women creatives in Africa "often earn less for comparable work," and are disproportionately concentrated in informal or freelance creative roles "which have irregular incomes and lack formal contracts." Sit with that pairing for a moment, because it inverts the usual framing. The conversation about women and the digital economy is so often a conversation about access — about getting women in. But on creation, women are not locked out. They are the visible workforce. What's missing isn't participation. It's the paperwork underneath the participation — the contract, the license, the registered claim to what they made.


Where creation stops being an asset


Only 17.7% of the inventors named on international patent applications in 2023 were women, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) — and WIPO's own estimate is that, at current rates, parity among patent-holding inventors won't arrive until 2077. That gap has nothing to do with willingness to create. It's a measure of who converts creative and technical work into a protected, transferable, monetizable asset — the difference between making something and owning what you made.


The money follows the same line. Women-led ventures in Africa attracted less than 1% of total venture capital funding in 2024, and the resulting gap against male-founded ventures has reached $2.5 billion over five years — despite female-founded ventures generating twice the revenue per dollar invested and 10% higher long-term growth, according to Boston Consulting Group's 2026 analysis of women's digital entrepreneurship in Africa. More than half of women-led businesses on the continent run on grant funding rather than equity, and women receive roughly 52% of Africa's grant funding overall. Grants are a fine bridge and a poor foundation: they don't compound, and they rarely come with the governance scaffolding — a shareholding structure, a board, a cap table — that turns a creative practice into an ownable enterprise.


So the honest description of the Create pillar isn't "women aren't creating enough." It's this: women are creating at the center of a fast-growing digital and creative economy, and structurally exiting that creation as unregistered, unprotected, and underfunded — at scale, and by a wide margin.


The creation gradient


Ownership, I argued in Issue 01, sits on a gradient rather than a binary. Creation does too, and it's worth naming the rungs, because most women I've trained or mentored are standing somewhere in the middle of this ladder without realizing there's a next step:


A design made for a client under a one-line WhatsApp agreement sits below the same design made under a written license that specifies usage rights and a renewal fee.


A page of original content posted directly to a platform sits below the same content first published to an owned blog or archive, then distributed to the platform.


A "digital product" sold as a one-off PDF sits below that product registered as a trademarked brand with a defined IP asset behind it.


A creative practice run as a sole proprietor's side income sits below the same practice incorporated as a company, with the creative output sitting on the company's balance sheet as an asset rather than in the founder's head.


None of these upgrades require Silicon Valley. They require knowing the rung exists, and building the habit of asking, every time you create something of value: what would it take for this to be mine on paper, not just mine in memory?


What would actually move this


I think (3) three things can become what shapes our trajectory if I'm being specific rather than aspirational:


  1. Put basic IP literacy inside every digital-skills programme, not just business ones. Letsibolo taught design software. It did not teach licensing, usage terms, or how to register a trademark for a personal brand — because we categorized that as "business training," to be added later, for the women who made it far enough to need it. That sequencing is the mistake. IP literacy has to sit next to the tool, not after the traction.


  1. Make grant funding conditional on formalization, not just delivery. More than half of women-led African businesses run on grants, per BCG's analysis. Grant-makers are one of the few actors with real leverage here — and could require, as a condition of disbursement, that recipients register IP, incorporate, or set up a formal cap table, rather than simply reporting on output.


  1. Count creation as economic contribution before it converts to revenue. Africa's creative sector already contributes nearly 4% of regional GDP and 8.2% of jobs, per the Mastercard Foundation and ICRW's research — yet most of that activity stays invisible to national statistics until it clears a formal-registration threshold, and the same research finds women are disproportionately concentrated in exactly the informal, contract-less segment most likely to be undercounted. What's measured shapes what's funded. Right now, we're measuring the wrong end of the pipeline, and undercounting the half of it that women hold.


I think about the Letsibolo cohort often — not with regret, because the skills were real and the work was real. But I built a design programme before I understood that design skill without asset literacy just produces excellent, ownerless output, faster. Teaching someone to create more is not the same as teaching them to keep what they create. I know the difference now. I didn't build it into the curriculum then. That's the correction this essay is trying to make in public, so the next cohort doesn't have to learn it the way mine did.


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Afternoon Papers is a monthly essay series on women, ownership, and the digital economy. Issue 02 opens the CBA Model — Create, Build, Architect — at its first pillar: Create.


Sources 

  • World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), "Women and Intellectual Property" [https://www.wipo.int/en/web/women] — 17.7% of PCT-listed inventors were women in 2023; parity estimated by 2077 at current rates Boston Consulting Group, "Financing Women's Digital Entrepreneurship: A Pathway to Closing Africa's Economic Gender Gap" 





Lerato Mphaka is a strategist, designer, and mentor with 15 years of experience building Lesotho's financial sector digital infrastructure. She is co-director of The Black Heron Group and founder of the LM Foundation.


 
 
 

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