By Akin Alaka,
When I checked this morning, a return ticket from Lagos to Yaoundé costs ₦1,711,928. A round trip from Lagos to London costs ₦1,069,659. London is 5.2 times farther away.
For entrepreneurs, this means one thing: it’s cheaper to expand to Dubai than to a neighbouring African market. This pricing paradox reflects deeper infrastructure challenges across the continent.
Have you experienced the multiple checkpoints between Lagos and Cotonou? I have, it violates and makes the ECOWAS protocols redundant.
The Congo River separates Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Yes, two capital cities across a four-kilometre stretch of water without a single bridge to enable trade.
These are literally the closest capital cities in the world without a bridge connection. It’s an infrastructure gap that perfectly illustrates the African connectivity challenges.
The Yamoussoukro Decision, signed by 44 African Union members to liberalize air transport, remains largely unimplemented.
This is one of the execution problems killing regional business growth. And it affects everyone from tech startups to agtech companies to chemical traders trying to scale across Africa.
Some months ago, while working on a documentary on African startups, I spoke to a couple of African entrepreneurs in my network, and I kept hearing the same story.
Zainab Omonaiye, Head of Commercial at Matta, the African B2B Marketplace for chemicals, puts it bluntly: ‘We want to keep expanding regionally, but the numbers just don’t work with the logistics infrastructure gap.’
Gafar Lawani of Terres De Passions, an Agtech startup in Cotonou, shared the same sentiment: ‘Transport costs are the #1 barrier to intra-African trade. How do we expand when shipping to Accra costs more than shipping to Amsterdam?’
The numbers back up their frustration. Hennie Heymans, CEO of DHL Express for Sub-Saharan Africa, explained the brutal reality: logistics costs in Africa are 3.5 times higher than high-volume international routes due to inefficiencies.
This means 40 per cent of the final cost of goods and services in Africa comes from transportation alone.
Think about that for a moment. Nearly half of what African consumers pay for products is just moving stuff around the continent.
For entrepreneurs, this creates an impossible choice: absorb crushing logistics costs that kill profit margins, or pass them to customers who can’t afford the premium. Either way, regional expansion becomes a losing proposition.
The question then is, how are successful companies executing regional expansion despite these infrastructure barriers?
The companies thriving aren’t waiting for the Yamoussoukro Decision to be implemented. They’re executing around their reality.
Take Matta, the B2B Chemicals Marketplace giant, for instance. Matta built partnerships with truck driver associations on both sides of every border they cross.
Then they install real-time GPS tracking on every shipment. When a truck gets delayed at a checkpoint, its operations team knows within minutes and reroutes the next delivery.
The result speaks for itself. Matta noticed an almost 40 per cent reduction in delivery uncertainty. Matta Logistics also created a “border relay system” where trucks from Nigeria drop goods at border towns, and local trucks from Benin complete the delivery.
They eliminate the multi-day delays sometimes associated with border crossing.
Terres De Passions formed buying cooperatives with five other agtech companies. Then they began pooling shipments to fill entire containers, splitting the astronomical transport costs. What used to cost $500 per ton now costs $180.
Matta also acquired micro-warehouses all over the minor and major cities, instead of concentrating their warehousing effort around the port, so their customers can reduce their commute and logistical fees.
When orders come in, it’s a 2-hour delivery, not a 2-day cross-border nightmare.
I’m documenting how African entrepreneurs solve problems that don’t exist anywhere else in the world.
For the past 14 years, I’ve been interviewing founders across the continent. Whether I talk to founders in Lagos tech startups or owners of Cotonou agtech to entrepreneurs in Cape Town.
We’re creating documentaries that show how Africans are building solutions the world has never seen.
The story behind African business growth isn’t what the headlines tell you. It’s not about funding rounds. It’s about entrepreneurs who look at a ₦1.7 million flight to Yaounde and ask: “How do we build a business anyway?”
Every entrepreneur I have spoken to reveals the same pattern: the companies winning in Africa aren’t the ones with the best infrastructure access.
They’re the ones with the best execution strategies.
That’s what I write about. That’s what my documentaries capture. The gap between what African businesses face and how the best ones actually scale.
The companies thriving in Africa aren’t waiting for infrastructure to improve – they’re executing around it.
Some are building regional hubs, others are forming transport cooperatives, and the smartest ones are factoring these costs into their pricing strategies from day one.
Nigerian businesses that master execution-first thinking are building $100M+ companies while their competitors wait for policy changes.
The infrastructure isn’t changing anytime soon. But the companies documenting 40% efficiency gains aren’t waiting.
The question isn’t why African infrastructure is expensive. It’s how YOUR business will execute growth despite it. Are you building around reality, or waiting for it to change?
What creative execution strategies have you seen work in your market?
#AfricanBusiness #Entrepreneurship #BusinessExpansion #StartupStories #LogisticsChallenges #BusinessStrategy #AfricanEntrepreneurs #ThoughtLeadership
- Akin Alaka, Content, Coverage. Documentaries.
