Voice of Women: A Landscape of Regional Consulting
The pipeline exists. The capital does not follow it. What the landscape actually looks like in 2026.
Across North and West Africa, a generation of women consultants, analysts, and policy operators has quietly built the intellectual infrastructure that regional governments, corporations, and multilateral institutions depend on. They are underrepresented in bylines, undercited in industry reports, and structurally underfunded relative to their male counterparts. This paper sets out where the landscape actually stands in 2026, and what the systemic constraints look like when measured with real numbers rather than declarations.
The numbers: capital, coverage, and the gap that persists
The capital access story is the starkest one. Women led startups in the Middle East and North Africa receive approximately 1.2% of venture capital, compared with 2% globally (World Economic Forum). Both figures are low. The regional figure sits at roughly 60% of the global figure a systemic, not marginal, gap. Data from MAGNiTT indicates that startups with at least one female founder represented approximately 24% of funded ventures in MENA since 2018, but in early 2023 closed just 23 deals compared with 90 deals for all male teams (WEF).
The talent story runs against the capital story. In Iran, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, women comprise more than 50% of STEM graduates, compared with 20% of engineering students in the United States (WEF). In other words: the pipeline exists. The capital does not follow the pipeline.
The consulting and advisory sector reflects the same pattern in a different register. Firms with strong female representation at partner level remain the exception, not the norm, across Casablanca, Tunis, Cairo, and Algiers. Where women are visible, they are often concentrated in specific verticals communications, corporate social responsibility, human capital rather than distributed across the core strategy, financial advisory, and risk practices that generate the highest revenue per hour.
What is working: three signals worth watching
The Algeria digital commerce initiative. In December 2025, the World Bank published a feature on the Ecommerce for Women Entrepreneurs in MENA project, funded by the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We Fi) (World Bank). Algeria established a steering committee comprising eight ministries to align the programme with national regulations. The project trained 51 certified coaches in digital marketing and ecommerce from the National Chamber of Handicraft and Skilled Trades (CNAM), the National Agency for Microcredit Management (ANGEM), and the private sector. As of late 2025, 119 women had completed the training, and more than 74% had integrated new online platforms into their businesses. The programme aims to reach 300 entrepreneurs in the short term (World Bank).
This is meaningful for two reasons. The first is scale: 300 entrepreneurs is not a large cohort, but the ANGEM training cascade is designed to reach approximately 27,500 promoters by the end of 2025 through 25 master trainers, each training 12 local trainers, mentoring roughly 92 new entrepreneurs per trainer. The second is the across ministries governance structure. Across ministries coordination is the failure point in most gender focused economic programmes across the region, and Algeria's model deserves study.
Regional women's summits are becoming professional infrastructure, not events. Conferences such as MENA Women Leaders' Summit and PWLBIC MEA 2026 have moved beyond the visibility and inspiration phase into a phase that produces coalitions, procurement pipelines, and mentoring cohorts. This is a shift that policymakers have been slow to acknowledge, but corporate procurement teams have not.
Grant capital is filling the gap that venture capital will not. Visa's "She's Next" initiative provides grants of $10,000 to $50,000 and connects participants with institutions including First Abu Dhabi Bank, National Bank of Kuwait, and Bank Muscat (WEF). Grants are not a substitute for equity, but for early stage founders in jurisdictions where dilutive capital is scarce, they compress the runway problem.
The specific to consulting view
Consulting is a professional services business with three structural gates: origination (who wins the mandate), delivery (who runs the engagement), and equity (who owns the firm). Across the Maghreb, women are increasingly present at delivery, less present at origination, and rare at equity. This is the pattern that Women in C.R.C exists to change not through advocacy alone, but through operational alternatives.
Three shifts in the operating model make the difference:
Origination through networked convening rather than individual pitching. Roundtables and closed door dialogues are how senior mandates are actually sourced in the region. The women who systematically host and curate such convenings build a pipeline that individual business development activity cannot match.
Delivery on the substantive practices, not the peripheral ones. Risk, compliance, financial advisory, and cross border strategy are the practices where hourly rates are highest and career progression is fastest. Communications and CSR are important, but they are not the practices that generate partner track economics.
Equity through platform ownership. Consulting as a service is highly leveraged to individual reputation. Consulting as a platform with intellectual property, published research, and a recurring editorial voice accrues to the platform, not only to its founder. This is the reason Carthage Risk Consulting stood up Women in C.R.C as a platform rather than a marketing initiative.
The regional pipeline
The pipeline of regional talent is real and often invisible to international headhunters. Universities in Tunis, Rabat, Casablanca, Cairo, and Dakar produce cohorts of women graduates who are underplaced relative to their credentials. Regional conferences and industry associations are the fastest way to identify this talent, but they are chronically underfunded relative to their impact. The correction is not one of ambition. It is one of capital deployed toward the right infrastructure.
The takeaway
The story of women in regional consulting is not a story of absence. It is a story of misallocation capital that does not follow the pipeline, procurement that does not track diversity, media coverage that romanticizes exceptional cases while ignoring the structural cohort behind them. This paper is a first attempt to describe the landscape as it actually looks in 2026.
The Voice of Women series will continue with interviews, case studies, and quarterly landscape updates. Nominations for contributors and interviewees are welcome at `info@carthage-consulting.com`.
About this paper. This is a working paper. Comments and corrections to info@carthage-consulting.com. Cite as: Women in C.R.C, "Voice of Women: A Landscape of Regional Consulting", C.R.C Editorial, September 2026.