The leaders who win in Africa do not stumble into success. They make deliberate moves before they even set foot on the ground. After decades of working across the continent and studying what separates those who thrive from those who retreat, I identified eight of those moves in my book Winning in Africa. They are not theories. They are the playbook.
1. Understand the rules of the road
Every market has an operating logic, both written and unwritten. In Africa, the unwritten rules often matter more. Regulatory environments shift, informal economies drive enormous value, and relationships precede transactions. Leaders who succeed study the terrain first. They ask the important questions. Not just “Is this legal?” but “Is this how business is actually done here?”
2. Make sure everyone wins
Extractive business models do not survive in Africa, at least not for long. The most durable companies on the continent create shared value for their partners, their communities, their governments, and their customers. This is not philanthropy, it is strategy. When stakeholders prosper alongside you, they protect your business and champion your growth.
3. Work with partners who open up the pathways
No foreign company wins in Africa alone. The right local partner is not just a convenience, it is a competitive advantage. They carry trust, navigate complexity, and unlock relationships that no amount of capital can buy. The key word is right. Choose partners who share your values, complement your capabilities, and have earned credibility in the markets you want to reach.
4. Get the right people
Talent is not scarce in Africa, but it is often misaligned. Many companies deploy leaders who are technically brilliant but culturally tone-deaf. Winning in Africa requires people who combine global expertise with local emotional intelligence. These are leaders who listen before they act, adapt without losing standards, and build trust across cultural lines.
5. Ask: what is good enough?
One of the most expensive mistakes Western companies make in Africa is over-engineering their solutions. Consumers across the continent are sophisticated, but their priorities differ. A product that is 80% of your global standard but priced for the African middle class will outsell a premium offering every time. The question “What is good enough?” is not a compromise, it is a discipline.
6. Localise your strategy
A strategy built in a boardroom in London, New York, or Dubai will not survive contact with Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra. What works in one African city may fail in the next. Successful leaders treat localisation as a core competency by adapting products, pricing, distribution, and messaging with precision – not as an afterthought.
7. Identify obstacles and find solutions
Africa will test your resilience. Infrastructure gaps, currency volatility, policy uncertainty: none of these are surprises, they are the conditions of the market. The leaders who win are not the ones who avoid obstacles; they are the ones who have already thought through solutions before the obstacles appear. Preparation converts problems into competitive advantages.
8. Lead like King Solomon – ethical leadership
Solomon’s wisdom was not merely intelligence. It was the courage to be fair, transparent, and principled under pressure. Africa’s business landscape rewards ethical leadership in ways that short-term thinking cannot measure. Reputation travels fast, communities remember, and governments take notice. Leaders who operate with integrity build institutions that outlast market cycles, and that is the ultimate competitive moat on the continent.
Africa’s opportunity is real.
So is the discipline required Africa represents the most significant business opportunity of the next fifty years. Its youthful population, urbanisation rate, and digital adoption are rewriting economic trajectories across the continent.
Africa’s window is open – but not forever
Africa’s middle class is projected to reach 1.1 billion by 2060. Its digital economy is growing at twice the global average. The leaders who enter now, equipped with the right moves, will define the competitive landscape for decades. Those who wait for certainty will arrive to find the doors already occupied.
Complexity punishes the unprepared
Studies show that over 60% of foreign companies that fail in Africa cite poor market understanding as the primary cause. Not lack of capital or bad products, but insufficient preparation. Africa’s diversity of languages, legal systems, currencies, and cultures means that a single strategic misstep can unravel years of investment.
Reputation is your most valuable currency
In African markets, word travels faster than marketing budgets can. A leader who enters without understanding local values, without building genuine partnerships, or without operating ethically will not just fail quietly, they will be remembered.
The leaders who win here win everywhere
Mastering the African market sharpens a leader’s instincts in ways no business school can replicate. The agility to localise, and the discipline to build coalitions and navigate ambiguity are the skills that define world-class leadership in any market.
Case studies
Many organisations arrive in Africa with a fully formed global playbook, assuming that what worked elsewhere will work here. It rarely does. Localisation is not cosmetic, it is structural.
Whether an entrant treats local difference as an input to be designed around, or as friction to be overpowered by global scale, can make or break their success in Africa.
M-Pesa: scale and impact
Kenya
Eighteen years on, M-Pesa is the textbook example of all eight moves compounding.
Safaricom’s mobile money solution M-Pesa was launched in Kenya in 2007 as an experiment in text-message money transfers. Today, it serves approximately 35.8 million active customers through more than 298 000 agents, driving nearly 44% of Safaricom Kenya’s service revenue. M-Pesa helped lift Kenyan’s formal financial inclusion from under 30% to nearly 80%.
M-Pesa is the definitive case for executing all eight strategic moves at once. Its edge was the full system, not any single feature.
Co-designed and launched in partnership with the Central Bank of Kenya, M-Pesa was built before the rules existed. The win-win model meant agents earned commission, government gained a payments rail, and the unbanked gained access.
Strategic partnerships, including funding from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, Vodafone technology, and credit from the Central Bank of Kenya all opened pathways it could not build alone.
The product was engineered for the market as it was, running on a communications protocol used on basic feature phones. There was no app, no smartphone, nor data plan required.
Operating obstacles were turned into moats – dense agent networks, super-agents for liquidity, and branded kiosks for trust. Finally, ethical guardrails such as capped small-transaction fees and hard credit limits prioritised long-term trust over short-term take-rate.
The lesson: legitimacy unlocked pathways, pathways unlocked people, people unlocked fit, fit unlocked scale, and ethics kept it all intact. Competitors copied two or three moves; M-Pesa executed all eight – and they compounded.
Diageo’s Guinness – product reformulation and localisation
Nigeria
Diageo’s Guinness rebuilt its product and supply chain around local reality in order to become woven into Nigeria culture.
Rather than exporting a rigid European template, Guinness treated Nigeria as a market deserving its own product. The strategic premise was that a brand could keep its heritage while letting taste, ingredients, price position, and route-to-market be dictated by local conditions rather than by headquarters convention.
The flagship in Nigeria is Foreign Extra Stout, a stronger, more intense beer than the draught Guinness familiar in Irish and British pubs. It is brewed locally using sorghum and maize rather than relying solely on imported barley. The recipe’s origins trace back to an export stout first brewed in 1801 and heavily hopped to survive long sea voyages.
Guinness worked with partners to open up pathways in the market, and localised their strategy with precision – not as an afterthought.
However, product reformulation alone would not have built durability. The decisive move in the brand’s success was structural: Diageo invested in embedding brewing, supply chain, and distribution across the West African region.
Its physical footprint – rather than a marketing layer – is what made the brand resilient to events that punished import-dependent competitors.
As a result, Africa grew into the most important region for the parent group’s Guinness sales, and Nigeria became one of the brand’s leading individual markets worldwide.
Shoprite Holdings – imported templates
Nigeria
Shoprite attempted to transplant a centralised, asset-heavy template into a new country and was steadily ground down by the conditions it failed to design for.
Shoprite entered Nigeria in 2005 with a single Lagos store and pursued scale by replicating the centralised, mall-anchored supermarket model that had served it well in Southern Africa.
While it did localise sourcing, the import-and-logistics-dependent operating model could not withstand the macro environment:
- Currency: sustained depreciation of the naira inflated costs
- Trade and supply: border closures, foreign-exchange shortages, rising import tariffs, and chaotic port logistics disrupted the flow of goods
- Demand: high inflation and weak consumer spending eroded the basket
- Competition: an agile, low-overhead informal retail sector competed on price and proximity in ways a fixed-cost supermarket could not match
In 2021, Shoprite Holdings exited direct ownership, selling the Nigerian business to a local consortium.
However, local ownership did not solve the underlying problem. Under continued macroeconomic pressure, shelves emptied, suppliers went unpaid, and outlets closed city by city through 2024 and 2025.
Imported templates fail when they require local infrastructure to bend to a foreign playbook – and transferring ownership locally does not, by itself, fix a model whose architecture was wrong for the terrain.
