Women know shrinkflation when they see it. Your favourite perfume suddenly comes in a smaller bottle, even though the price has barely changed. We notice because the same trend is happening across household budgets, with more of our money buying less.
In South Africa, where inflation reached 5% in June, that instinct has sharpened. Rising transport and household costs are pushing many women to think differently about both spending and earning.
The household economy is often where financial pressure first becomes visible and where decisions about earning an income or creating greater security begin. For many South African women, those decisions lead towards entrepreneurship.
Some start businesses because they have identified an opportunity they feel compelled to pursue, while others begin because formal employment has not provided a reliable route to income. In 2023, 58.9% of women running informal businesses said unemployment was the main reason they had started, according to Stats SA. Starting small is possible, but building something competitive is expensive.
Over time, technology has reduced some of the costs that once 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 much larger company behind it.
Artificial intelligence takes that 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 may still 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 with markets, while Tshaamano Mabuba’s BuddyAI places a multilingual tutor on WhatsApp. Both 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. The more important question is whether that use remains at the edge of the business or moves closer to the decisions that shape its future.
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 still 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 existing advantage while small business, capable of so much more, confines it to administrative convenience.
Huawei’s Women in Tech programme is designed around that distinction. Skills are the entry point, while the greater ambition is to help women connect technology to the economics of the businesses they are already building.
Shrinkflation has trained us to notice what has disappeared. Artificial intelligence asks us to notice what is becoming available, including the possibility that a small business can command intelligence once reserved for an organisation many times its size.
South African women already 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.
- This article was written by Christina Naidoo, Chief Operating Officer, Huawei South Africa
