Serious about Africa: Look offline.
I put up a tweet a couple of days ago with a picture I took in an Abuja Market (Nigeria), and the response I got me thinking, if people really recognize where the value in the African market is. The tweet is below.
Most of the money in the African market is in places like this. Better folds your sleeves & fasten your heels if you want to compete. https://t.co/EXFRNq5gO8
In Nigeria, a great deal if not all still happen offline. From food, to clothes to media. Yes media, people still go to markets to load music to their phones. We in the tech community almost forget to remember that there is an underlying factor why we feel technology is accessible and everybody should be able to use it. This underlying factor is LANGUAGE. For the most part the language of the web is English. Just imagine if in Nigeria, the web had pockets where the language was Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and a host of other languages native to us. Adoption of smartphones and the internet might improve because finally its useful to us.
It might seem trivial to some but the Nigerian market is offline and going close to it and understanding it will improve your chances of making returns in Nigeria and Africa as a whole.
Paga, understands this. That’s why they built out an agency network for their business. The agency network at the moment has approx 11,500 agents.Great work Tayo Oviosu and his team.
irokotv also understands this. That's why they focused on Mobile and offline downloads. Even went as deep as setting up kiosks around the country to help customers get iroko content on their phones without the data overhead (Data-free download Kiosks). Moves that seemed like madness at first but later became clear that the moves were spot on for the Nigerian market. Great work Jason 'Igwe' Njoku and his team.
It might seem hard at first and unorganised, but there is a method to the madness and the value beneath all the chaos of the informal offline markets in Nigeria and Africa as a whole would be worth the dig.
If you like this story, please follow as i would be writing more about the informal markets in Nigeria and how to make returns from it in a mutually beneficial way to all players involved. #consciouscapitalism
More in-depth analysis on Paga and irokotv and how they are winning the offline market coming soon. Working on a comprehensive case-study of Nigerian businesses. Please watch this space.
