In March, MENA venture capital funded no women at all

MENA startup funding fell to $48.3m in March 2026, according to Wamda's monthly tracking. Of that, no disclosed capital went to startups founded by women. March was a weak month overall — $48.3m is roughly a tenth of what a single strong month in the region has produced — so a low absolute figure for any category is unsurprising. A zero is not the same thing. Small numbers can be averaged, explained and forecast. A zero in a monthly series means the process that allocates capital produced no instance of a particular outcome across an entire month of deals. At the region's normal deal cadence, a month contains somewhere between 20 and 40 disclosed rounds. If women-founded companies represented even 6% of fundable pipeline — their share of H1 2026 deal count — a month with 30 deals would be expected to include one or two. Producing none is possible by chance, and it is more consistent with an underlying rate below the headline share than with an unlucky month. March's weakness is itself part of the picture. MENA funding in the first half of 2026 was highly concentrated: MAGNiTT recorded that the top ten transactions accounted for 58% of all funding, and two rounds alone — CargoX and Mal — were worth $480m between them. In a market where a majority of capital flows through a handful of very large rounds, the months between those rounds are thin. Thin months concentrate whatever deals do close on the investors' highest-conviction, most familiar profiles, which is the mechanism by which an underrepresented group's share falls fastest when conditions tighten. The regional context is contraction. MAGNiTT put MENA H1 2026 at $1.35bn across 214 deals , a 22% fall in funding and a 41% fall in deal count. Wamda, which counts differently, put the same period at $1.7bn across 242 rounds , an 18% fall. The two trackers disagree on the level — they treat debt, grants and undisclosed rounds differently — and agree entirely on the direction. Deal count falling almost twice as fast as capital is the signal that matters. The market is not distributing less money across the same number of companies. It is funding fewer companies and writing larger cheques to the ones it funds, which is the environment in which any founder profile outside the established pattern is hardest to find in the data.