Angola’s Hidden Dividend - What Women Can Build When the State Collapses

In Angola, the collapse isn’t sudden it’s structural.

Over the past weeks, we've seen fires in hotels, universities, explosions in residential buildings, markets reduced to ashes, and lives lost to preventable tragedies. For many, this wave of devastation feels accidental. For others, it’s fate. But for those of us paying attention, it’s something else: the visible cost of institutional fragility and unaccountable leadership.

When the state fails to protect, regulate or serve, women do not wait they rebuild. Angola is becoming a case study in what happens when women, particularly those excluded from capital and governance, begin to create parallel systems of resilience not out of ideology, but necessity.

The Shadow Infrastructure Women Are Building

In neighborhoods where the water system collapsed, women walk miles for water and even create side businesses. In cities without formal employment, they launched small-scale cooperatives. In financial deserts, they created savings circles ( KIXIKILAS), rotating credit schemes and informal insurance mechanisms.

What is emerging is a shadow infrastructure of survival and solidarity largely invisible to policymakers and lenders, but increasingly central to Angola’s real economy.

I know this because I live it. As the founder of BOVE and WEA two platforms dedicated to women’s economic power in Angola I’ve witnessed how women are redesigning the future with dignity.(Of course, outside of the social media spotlight)

They are:

• Turning informal networks into credit businesses
• Transforming their homes into schools, clinics, bakeries,beauty sallons and safe spaces
• Becoming financiers, arbitrators, educators and, when necessary, regulators ( We can call then MOTHERs)

What Investors and Policymakers Are Missing

Too often, development models ignore this economy.

They focus on "empowering women" but forget to fund their systems, measure their impact, or embed their logic into formal planning.(Shame)

Here’s what we know:

• Women invest 90% of their income back into families and communities.
• Informal economies where women dominate account for most of Angola’s GDP.
• Female-led financial solutions outperform traditional models in repayment and community impact.

Yet, women receive less than 5 % of formal investment capital and are barely represented in macroeconomic decision-making.( (I hope this answers how many times I am asked why I do what I do today... Please)

This is not just injustice, it's bad economics.

Angola’s Hidden Dividend: Resilience Capital

WOMEN ARE NOT A NICHE, THEY ARE THE MASS

Angola’s hidden dividend is its women. Not in theory, but in resilience capital:

• The capacity to generate returns under pressure
• The ability to create trust in trustless environments
• The instinct to protect the future, even when abandoned by the present

Our cooperative WEA,RL isn’t just offering credit, it’s modeling a new form of governance: one that is participatory, data-driven, transparent and grounded in African reality.

Our community platform BOVE360 is not simply a network it is a business leadership lab, training women to be economic actors, legal advocates and civic transformers.

We are not asking for sympathy. We are inviting alignment.

Please, support African-grown solutions. Fund the infrastructure women already operate.

Don’t just look for tech startups look for women keeping cities alive.

Please, apply a gender lens that goes beyond optics. Invest in cooperatives, networks and social capital. There’s return there both financial and human.

If you want to rebuild Angola, start by financing its mothers. Reform must include economic dignity, institutional accountability and the leadership of women.

The Future Is Already Being Built — Quietly, Boldly, By Women

History will ask who led Angola out of collapse. The answer won’t be a single name or office.

It will be thousands of women with no title, no budget, and no time building systems where the state disappeared.

I know, because I’m building with them. And we’re just getting started.

By Maria Uini Baptista an African financial strategist and former chair of Angola’s Capital Market Commission. She is currently founder of BOVE360 and WEA, focused on economic inclusion and financial innovation in frontier markets.

Luanda, June 14, 2025