In 1805, Madame Clicquot took over the House of Veuve Clicquot after the death of her husband, at a time when women had no legal right to work or hold a bank account. She went on to transform it into one of the world’s most recognised champagne houses.
The Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Awards, now in its fifth year in South Africa, bears her legacy and continues to highlight women operating with a similar quality of conviction. This year’s six finalists are worth knowing.
The award runs across two categories. The Bold Woman Award recognises established entrepreneurs who have built and sustained successful businesses for more than five years. The Bold Future Award spotlights emerging leaders whose businesses are less than five years old but already driving meaningful change.
Between the six finalists, the industries range from manufacturing and transport safety to clean beauty and sustainable fashion. The common thread, however, is less about sector and more about disposition: these are women who identified a problem, often a deeply personal one, and built something around it.
Bold Woman Award Finalists
Lindiwe Nkuna-Kgopa | Founder and CEO, Lindiwe Sanitary Pads
Eleven years ago, a guest speaker at a women’s event made an offhand remark: South Africa had never had a female president, and no woman had ever owned a sanitary pad factory at an industrial scale. The room moved on. Lindiwe Nkuna-Kgopa did not.
Founded in 2018, Lindiwe Sanitary Pads has grown into Africa’s first large-scale sanitary pad manufacturing facility owned and run entirely by women, producing 800 SABS-compliant pads per minute from a 4,000m² factory in Centurion. The business supplies South Africa’s National Sanitary Dignity Programme and reached more than 100,000 school girls with free sanitary products in 2026 alone.
During one of the company’s most difficult periods, with empty accounts and suppliers at the door, Nkuna-Kgopa personally invited executives from Absa and the IDC to her factory floor and presented her vision directly. She secured over R27m in funding without collateral. “I sat in my car outside the factory I had built from nothing and made a choice,” she says. “Not to survive, but to thrive.”
Xolile Mabuza | Founder and CEO, Tendalo Trading
Xolile Mabuza suffered a stroke shortly before university and faced a long recovery before picking up a discarded rubber tube on the side of the road and turning it into an owl-shaped earring. That earring became the beginning of Tendalo Trading.
Founded in 2019, Tendalo transforms discarded rubber tubes into premium handcrafted bags and accessories, diverting around 1.2-million rubber tubes from landfills every month. One of its defining moments came during a major retail launch: the product was rejected a week before delivery, the production money had already been spent on a redo, and the machine broke with R145 left in the account. Mabuza pitched an investor she had never previously convinced and secured the funding she needed within 24 hours.
Her work has since attracted international attention, including a conversation with Prince William about how recycled rubber could challenge the future of luxury fashion. “Starting this business was me finally raising my hand,” she says.
Sonto Pooe | Founder and CEO, Nativechild
Nativechild began with a memory. At eight years old, Sonto Pooe experienced painful hair damage after a salon visit. Decades later, that experience became the foundation for a plant-based, vegan hair and body care line designed specifically for people of colour, starting with a single castor oil product mixed in her kitchen.
Nativechild is now stocked by Clicks, Checkers, Pick n Pay, Dis-Chem and Shoprite, with distribution extending into multiple African markets and the US. Pooe left a stable corporate career to build it, entering a market dominated by chemical relaxers with a product and a philosophy that said natural and afro-textured hair was something to be celebrated rather than chemically altered.
“This is proof that African brands built with purpose, quality and authenticity can stand confidently on the same shelves as global giants,” she says. Nativechild is also one of the first black-owned hair and body care brands to build a large-scale e-commerce presence in South Africa.
Bold Future Award Finalists
Pretty Kubyane | Co-Founder and Tech Lead, eFama App
Pretty Kubyane describes herself as a “village girl by birth and a technical powerhouse by design”. As co-founder and tech lead of eFama App, she is transforming agricultural supply chains across Africa through technology, AI and data-driven infrastructure, connecting farmers with buyers through a digital marketplace trusted by thousands of users across South Africa.
When investors doubted that a woman without a formal engineering degree could lead a high-stakes agricultural technology venture, Kubyane spent hundreds of hours mastering coding, cloud architecture, cybersecurity and AI. She now holds more than 40 global certifications and leads a team with backing from Google and Meta. She has also, along the way, raised a sick child, sat for technical exams under serious financial pressure and walked away from a toxic client contract that threatened her family’s stability. “True boldness,” she says, “is knowing that your worth is nonnegotiable.”
Maambele Khosa | Founder and CEO, SheCab
In 2021, during a period of rising gender-based violence in South Africa, Maambele Khosa asked herself a straightforward question: if she felt unsafe travelling alone, how many other women felt the same? SheCab was her answer.
Built initially through WhatsApp-based bookings and without external investment, SheCab is a women-led e-hailing and charter transport platform connecting female passengers with professional female drivers across the Western Cape and beyond.
Every role in the company, from drivers and operations to leadership and accounting, is held by women.
“One of my SheCab drivers received a life-changing career opportunity through a passenger she met during a ride,” Khosa says. “That’s when I realised SheCab is not just a transport service. It’s a space where women see each other and choose to lift each other up.”
Tshaamano Mabuba | Founder and CTO, Buddy Learning
Tshaamano Mabuba started Buddy Learning at 22 with R50 and a free Instagram page. It has since supported more than 10,000 families and created income opportunities for young tutors across Southern Africa.
Its flagship platform, BuddyAI, is Africa’s first multilingual AI-powered tutor built directly into WhatsApp, designed for low-data environments and providing curriculum-aligned tutoring, quizzes, voice-note support and multilingual learning assistance.
Mabuba built it while navigating serious health challenges as a student, using tutoring income to fund her own medical treatment and an operation at age 20. “Boldness feels quiet when nobody is watching,” she says. “It feels like waking up and choosing the difficult but necessary thing.”
The winners of the 2026 Bold Woman Award and Bold Future Award by Veuve Clicquot will be announced on Wednesday 15 July, with both winners joining the global Bold by Veuve Clicquot network.
Wanted
