The fifth edition of the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Awards in South Africa recognises six entrepreneurs transforming industries through innovation, sustainability and social impact South Africa’s entrepreneurial landscape has long celebrated disruption. But the finalists announced for the fifth Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Awards suggest that the country’s most ambitious founders are no longer chasing innovation for its own sake. They are building businesses that begin with lived experience, whether that is navigating period poverty, recovering from illness, feeling unsafe on public transport or trying to access education in under-resourced communities.
The six finalists for this year’s awards paint a picture of entrepreneurship rooted in solving everyday problems rather than creating luxury products or chasing Silicon Valley-style growth. Their businesses span manufacturing, beauty, transport, agriculture, sustainability and artificial intelligence but what binds them together is an insistence that commercial success and social impact do not have to exist separately. Now in its fifth year in South Africa, the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Awards continue a global initiative inspired by Madame Clicquot, who inherited the champagne house at 27 and transformed it into one of the world’s most recognised luxury brands at a time when women rarely occupied positions of business leadership.
More than two centuries later, the award has evolved into a platform recognising women who are challenging convention in their own industries. This year’s established entrepreneur finalists reflect the breadth of the ambition. Lindiwe Nkuna-Kgopa has built Africa’s first industrial-scale sanitary pad manufacturing facility owned and operated entirely by women, transforming what was once considered a taboo conversation into a manufacturing business with national reach.
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Beyond producing sanitary products, her company is opening pathways for women to own brands in an industry historically dominated by multinational corporations. For Nkuna-Kgopa, resilience has become as important as production capacity. During one of her company’s most difficult financial periods, she secured more than R27 million in funding despite lacking traditional collateral.
“Our accounts were empty. Suppliers were at the door. My team was watching,” she says.
“I sat in my car outside the factory I had built from nothing and made a choice. Not to survive but to thrive.”
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