Gender in Focus: How E-Commerce is Transforming Women’s Entrepreneurship in Côte d’Ivoire
A new African Development Bank Group digital publication provides guidance and tools for African women entrepreneurs in agriculture and other sectors to embrace e-commerce.
Every morning in Abidjan, a fabric seller begins her day not at her market stall, but on her phone. Overnight, customers have placed orders through messages and social media comments, confirming prints, quantities and delivery times. By the time she reaches her stall, much of her day’s business is already secured.
Across Côte d’Ivoire, this quiet digital shift is redefining how women entrepreneurs work. What often begins as informal exchanges on familiar platforms is steadily evolving into structured online commerce, improving predictability, reducing risk and helping women better manage their time.
To support this transition, the African Development Bank and its partners have published the E-Commerce Manual for African Women Entrepreneurs. Designed around women’s daily business realities, the manual goes beyond technology. It guides entrepreneurs through the full digital business journey – from choosing the appropriate platforms and building trust in online payments, to managing logistics and using simple data to inform decisions. For women already leveraging social media to reach customers, it offers practical tools to professionalise and scale their activities.
This routine puts everyday meaning behind the numbers we often talk about. I have come across many stories like these in Côte d’Ivoire. They often come up in conversations, during field visits, or while listening to women entrepreneurs describe how they organise their days. For women balancing business activities with unpaid care work, e-commerce is quietly reshaping how businesses are run and how time is managed.
Across Africa, women continue to face structural barriers that limit their full economic participation. The burden of unpaid care work remains disproportionately high, while gaps persist across economic and social opportunities. Yet women entrepreneurs continue to drive local economies with remarkable resilience. Despite these constraints, African women create businesses at higher rates than anywhere else in the world, as highlighted in the Africa Gender Index 2023 Analytical Report . What the data does not always show, however, is the daily adaptations women make to sustain their businesses.
For many women entrepreneurs in Côte d’Ivoire, e-commerce does not begin with a formal online store. It starts with platforms they already use daily. WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok have become essential business tools.
Through WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages, women selling attiéké, vegetables, or spices take advance orders, manage recurring customers and organise deliveries. TikTok Live has emerged as a powerful real-time sales channel, particularly for fabric traders who showcase prints, respond instantly to questions and sell stock in bulk – often without spending long hours physically at the market.
During the African Development Bank-hosted 50 Million African Women Speak online training programme, focused on practical digital and entrepreneurial skills, I repeatedly heard women explain how online channels were helping stabilise demand in unpredictable market environments. One entrepreneur, Nadine Fiossi, described how the training transformed her business: “The training allowed me to considerably increase my profits. By using tools that we learned during the programme, I was able to improve my marketing strategies and streamline my operations, making my business more efficient overall.”
These practices are further explored in the E-Commerce Manual, particularly in its section on digital marketing, which demonstrates how social media visibility can be strategically leveraged to build customer trust and sustained sales.
E-commerce does not replace traditional markets; it complements them. By combining online ordering with mobile money and local delivery services, women reduce transaction costs and reinvest more quickly. Beyond sales and market access, one of the most important benefits of e-commerce is time savings. Time poverty remains one of the most persistent challenges facing women. In Côte d’Ivoire, women spend almost three times as much time as men on unpaid care and domestic work, according to the Le Profil Genre de la Côte d’Ivoire [Côte d’Ivoire Country Gender Profile, co-published by the African Development Bank. For many women, saving even a few hours a day can make a real difference. Digital commerce offers one way to better balance income generation with family responsibilities.
Building on existing digital habits, the E-Commerce Manual offers tools to help women make informed decisions, manage logistics, and grow their businesses.
At the African Development Bank, we work to turn these digital practices into broader impact, through investments in digital infrastructure, skills development, and access to finance, including initiatives such as Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa and Fashionomics Africa. When macro-level statistics meet real-life experiences, digital transformation becomes tangible. It is not abstract; it happens one message, one order, and one entrepreneur at a time.
Aïssatou Aïda Dosso is Principal Gender Business Development Officer at the African Development Bank, driving transformative finance and development solutions that empower women across Africa and support countries in tackling structural inequalities in fragile settings
