Women know shrinkflation when they see it. Your favourite perfume suddenly comes in a smaller bottle, even though the price has barely changed. The trend is happening across household budgets, with more of our money buying less.
In South Africa, where inflation reached 5% in June, rising transport and household costs are pushing many women to think differently about spending and earning.
The household economy is often where financial pressure first becomes visible and decisions about earning an income or creating greater security begin. For many South African women, the decisions lead towards entrepreneurship.
In 2023, 58.9% of women running informal businesses said unemployment was the main reason they had started, according to Statistics SA.
Starting small is possible but building something competitive is expensive. Technology has reduced some of the costs that kept smaller businesses at a disadvantage. Connectivity opened access to wider markets, while digital payments and cloud-based tools made it easier to trade and manage operations without needing the size of a larger company behind it.
Artificial intelligence takes the progress further by bringing more insight into the decisions that shape a business. Women entrepreneurs can test an idea, examine customer behaviour or explore a new market without first building the kind of specialist team only a much bigger business could usually justify.
Their experience and knowledge of their customers remain central. AI gives them more information to work with before committing limited resources.
When a company with a small team can ask better questions, consider more possibilities and make more informed decisions, it might be a small business but it is no longer operating with small intelligence.
Pretty Kubyane’s eFama uses digital technology, data and AI to connect farmers directly to markets, while Tshaamano Mabuba’s BuddyAI places a multilingual tutor on WhatsApp. The founders have taken a capability that used to belong to organisations many times their size and redesigned the route through which an ordinary business can reach it.
Mastercard research found that 47% of surveyed South African women business owners were using AI regularly, with 63% reporting savings in time or money.
Used superficially, AI can make the working day easier. Used with commercial intent, it can help a founder recognise where value is being lost, investigate a new market or decide whether an idea deserves scarce capital.
Access alone will not create equal advantage. A small firm needs reliable connectivity, usable information and enough judgement to recognise when a confident answer is wrong.
The danger is that big business uses AI to deepen an advantage while small business confines it to administrative convenience.
Our Huawei’s Women in Tech programme is designed around the distinction. Skills are the entry point, while the greater ambition is to help women connect technology to the economics of the businesses they are building.
Women know how to build under constraint. The more promising shift is that the size of a business may no longer determine the scale of intelligence available to the woman building it.
•Naidoo is chief operating officer, Huawei South Africa
- Women know shrinkflation when they see it.
- Your favourite perfume suddenly comes in a smaller bottle, even though the price has barely changed.
- The trend is happening across household budgets, with more of our money buying less.
- In South Africa, where inflation reached 5% in June, rising transport and household costs are pushing many women to think differently about spending and earning.
- The household economy is often where financial pressure first becomes visible and decisions about earning an income or creating greater security begin.
