'We’ll expand into Africa once the infrastructure is ready.' I hear versions of this in boardrooms all the time, and it sounds sensible. Who wants to build a business on broken roads, an unreliable grid, and a logistics map full of blank spaces?
Author: David Blyth, founder and CEO at Delta Victor Bravo
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the roads, rails and power stations you’re waiting for may not arrive on your timeline. Only about 40% of rural Africans have access to an all-season road. Just 45% of sub-Saharan Africans have reliable electricity. If 'ready' is your prerequisite, you’ll be waiting a very long time, while someone bolder eats your lunch.
The businesses winning in Africa didn’t wait. They did one of three things: they built the infrastructure themselves, they routed cleverly around it, or they skipped it altogether.
Build it yourself
Dangote turned Africa’s infrastructure gaps into a business model. In cement, it vertically integrated the entire supply chain, mining its own limestone and even generating its own power. Conventional thinking says that’s expensive and complicated. It is. But in infant industries, where third parties simply can’t do the job, building it yourself is often the smartest strategy. Tolaram did the same to bring Indomie noodles to Nigeria: it started its own logistics company, built a fleet of trucks, vans and motorcycles, and put up natural gas power plants for its factories. Samsung, faced with customers who had no reliable electricity, didn’t shrug, it built solar-powered digital villages and supplied its own.
Route around it
When the roads in Morocco are too narrow for Western trucks, Coca-Cola loads up donkey carts and camels, no billion-dollar logistics tech, just local bottlers who know the terrain and a willingness to adapt. LifeBank delivers blood, oxygen and vaccines to hospitals across Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya using drones and boats where roads fail. And PEP, instead of waiting for a delivery network in townships that have no formal home addresses, turned its 2,600 existing stores into a courier service, Paxi, so customers collect parcels where they already shop.
Skip it entirely
This is the real leapfrog. Africa never built out the dense landline and bank-branch networks of the West, so it jumped straight past them. From M-Pesa to SnapScan to Yoco, the continent pioneered mobile payments that the rest of the world is now modelling. When you have no legacy infrastructure to protect, you’re free to build the next thing instead of maintaining the old one.
Notice the pattern. None of these companies treated missing infrastructure as a reason to stay home and wait. They treated it as a design brief.
So, the practical question isn’t 'How do we fix the infrastructure?' That’s someone else’s hundred-year project. The better propelling questions are sharper, and entirely within your control: What can we build ourselves that third parties can’t yet provide? What existing asset, a store network, a fleet, a community of traders, can we repurpose? And what legacy step can we skip altogether? This is we can-if thinking in action.
With this mindset, constraints stop looking like reasons to wait, and start looking like the edge you’ve been missing. As one marketer put it to us, if Africa were a smooth highway, we’d lose the beauty of double-digit growth. The bumps aren’t bugs. They’re where the opportunity hides for the companies brave enough to stop waiting for perfect conditions and start working brilliantly within real ones.
Africa isn’t going to be 'ready' for you. And the best businesses were never going to wait, anyway.
Source: Africa’s Beautiful Constraints – How to Transform Limitations into Advantage (eatbigfish Africa, 2025). Examples and figures drawn from the white paper’s ‘Infrastructure’ section and case studies (Dangote, Tolaram/Indomie, Samsung, Coca-Cola, LifeBank, PEP), and its discussion of fintech leapfrogging (M-Pesa, SnapScan, Yoco).
