Contrary to some unfortunate (yet I believe quite widely spread) beliefs, Africa is often associated as being a single “country” rather than an actual “continent”.
At the end of the day, this only promotes a poor general understanding of the continent’s business dynamics. This can often result in companies addressing many markets at once without the foresight to step back and clearly analyze a specific market / country in its own right. By engaging down this road, a company will inevitably fail.
Every country has its own dynamics, its own constraints, its own opportunities. Meaning that for every country, you will need to do your homework : understand the market, its trends, its needs, its socio-economic factors, and the ways of doing business.
With that said, their exists common regional caracteristics that if understood and aknowledged can be built on in order to effectively do business cross regionally in Africa.
The idea here is to find the “replicability” factors that will bring success to building up an African strategy.
The starting point in this approach is to select one country with which to begin doing business before addressing others in a specific region. The notion of “regional hub” country which I would refer to as real gatekeepers is very strong here.
This post is voluntarily short in order to gather comments and get the debate going around :
- Identifying regional hubs. How fundamental are they really ? If so, which ones are they ? Why ?
- Understanding regional dynamics. How is this going to help in shaping one’s business strategy ?
(Sylvain)
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