What better way to close Women’s Month than by celebrating women who are not waiting for permission to build the futures they imagine?For its fifth year in South Africa, Veuve Clicquot’s Bold Woman Award has recognised two women doing exactly that: Lindiwe Nkuna-Kgopa, founder of Lindiwe Sanitary Pads, who was named the 2026 Bold Woman Award winner, and Pretty Kubyane, Co-founder and Tech Lead of eFama App, who received the Bold Future Award. The awards, announced at a celebration at Four Seasons Hotel The Westcliff in Johannesburg, honour women whose work is shifting industries, creating opportunity and challenging ideas about who gets to lead.
Lindiwe Nkuna-Kgopa: Turning “No” Into an Empire
Lindiwe Nkuna-Kgopa’s story begins in a home kitchen and now spans a 4,000sqm manufacturing facility in Centurion. Founder of Lindiwe Sanitary Pads, she leads Africa’s first large-scale sanitary pad manufacturing facility entirely owned and operated by women. Her company produces 800 SABS-compliant pads every minute, employs more than 100 people during peak periods and has expanded into 11 countries. But the numbers only tell part of the story. When Lindiwe first sought investment, she was told she didn’t have the manufacturing experience or the right profile to succeed. A decade later, she has built a business that directly challenges that assumption while creating jobs and economic opportunities for women.
In 2026 alone, Lindiwe Sanitary Pads provided more than 100,000 schoolgirls with free sanitary products. Her journey is a reminder that sometimes the most powerful response to being underestimated is simply to keep building.
Pretty Kubyane: Building Africa’s Food Future
For Pretty Kubyane, the future is digital. As Co-founder and Tech Lead of eFama App, Pretty is using technology, AI and data to rethink how farmers and buyers connect across Africa. The platform now supports more than 40,000 farmers, helping them make smarter production decisions based on market demand.
Raised in a farming family, Pretty’s relationship with agriculture began long before eFama. Her path into technology, however, was largely self-built. Despite scepticism around her lack of a formal engineering degree, she immersed herself in coding, cloud architecture, cybersecurity and AI, earning more than 40 global certifications along the way.
Her ambition extends beyond building a successful company. Pretty is working towards creating one of the continent’s largest food ecosystems, proving that innovation doesn’t always come from the places we expect it to created an environment where different industries and perspectives could meet, overlap and inspire one another. Because when women gather, stories are exchanged, relationships deepen, ideas begin to grow and women are reminded that they do not have to carry everything alone.
Boldness, Reimagined
Lindiwe and Pretty represent two very different industries, but their stories share a common thread: they refused to let other people’s limitations become their own.
Their recognition places them alongside a global community of women entrepreneurs carrying forward the spirit of Madame Clicquot women who have challenged convention, built against the odds and made space for others along the way. The Johannesburg celebration, hosted by Nomndeni Mdakhi, brought that spirit to life, with a specially commissioned performance by poet and author Lebo Mashile and reflections from 2025 laureate Retang Phaahla. Because perhaps the most powerful thing about boldness is that it doesn’t stop with one woman it creates a path for the next.
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