Most well-capitalised firms entering Francophone Africa fail within 18 months. Not because the market wasn’t ready for them. Because they weren’t ready for the market.
Consumer surveys in markets where 70–80% of economic activity is informal capture only the formal layer. Census data is unreliable. Market research firms extrapolate from insufficient samples.
The market they can measure is not the market that determines whether you win or lose.
30 conversations with real people on the ground beats €50,000 of desk research. Every time.
The official OHADA framework is not the real framework. I map actual timelines — sequencing dependencies, jurisdiction-level variations across WAEMU, and the unofficial gates that determine whether your licence takes 6 weeks or 24 months.
The relationship precedes the transaction. Always. I build the introductions, trust structures, and service culture that prevent the failure pattern where competitors with inferior products win every significant partnership because they invested in relationships first.
Embedded inside a 200M+ download consumer platform across Francophone Africa — tracking real-time behaviour. Measuring what this market actually does. Not what surveys say it does.
Positioning, localisation, and distribution architecture for technology companies entering Francophone Africa. From BCEAO regulatory compliance to CFA franc pricing. From partner identification to the first profitable quarter.
Your app, website, communications. Localised for Francophone Africa — not translated. The Ivorian register. The Sahelian cultural filter. The consumer vocabulary that actually converts. “Vient de tomber” not “vient de sortir.”
Who distributes your product in Abidjan is not who distributes it in Bouaké. The informal trade network that moves goods from the Plateau to the interior operates on a logic your logistics consultant in Paris has never mapped.
Direct access to verified Francophone Africa producers. Agricultural products. Industrial commodities — PKC hard shell, palm kernel derivatives. Cashew, cacao, agri-inputs. Source to procurement desk. No inflated intermediary chain.
Not freelancers juggling ten projects. Not AI agents with limited scope. Real humans — dedicated full-time — working 9h to 18h for your company. Developers, sales, closers, customer support, graphic designers. All Francophone native. Same time zone as France.
I handle recruitment, daily oversight, hardware, office, internet. You manage your projects and delegate — as if your team were in your own office. Bac+5 developers. Motivated. Legally declared. Fully equipped.
“The Dioula trader moving construction materials from Abidjan through Burkina Faso into Mali does not know AfCFTA exists. He has been doing intra-African trade for three generations. His network crosses the same borders — and it works today, without a single ratified document.”
“The CEO’s calendar in Year 1 is a market entry instrument. For the two-hour lunches where the first 90 minutes cover everything except business — those 90 minutes are the business.”
A field intelligence report from 1,979 pages of community data, across 8 WAEMU markets, gathered through a single field intelligence network — and what standard market research missed.
From OHADA compliance timelines to the Lagos-to-Abidjan transfer error — drawn from ground-level observation inside the WAEMU zone. “Cash is still king,” one reader added: payment flexibility across Wave, MTN Money and Orange Money isn’t a feature here — it’s survival.
Reading a regional fintech deal for what it actually signals about payments infrastructure across the union.
A 20-minute Terrain Briefing. Your specific market question. What it costs to get this right — versus wrong.