Emeka Ajene ✍🏽

In 2018, I moved to Togo & spent the next four years building Africa's super app, starting w/ Francophone Africa Today, Gozem operates across multiple verticals in 🇹🇬, 🇧🇯, 🇬🇦, and 🇨🇲 I recently transitioned away & had some time to reflect Here are 10 lessons I learned...

Aliko Dangote’s business playbook is simple: find where billions of dollars leave the African continent every year, then build the capacity to keep that money at home. When asked how he decides which businesses to be in, Africa’s richest man answers: "I first of all look at what we need as people: What is it that we're supposed to be producing, but we're importing?” In other words, find what Africa imports then produce it domestically. It’s usually termed import substitution, but he calls it backward integration — understandably because in practice he often does both simultaneously. Every business in the Dangote Group — cement, sugar, salt, petroleum refining, fertilizer, petrochemicals — exists because Africa was spending billions importing something from abroad. If you want to follow Dangote’s blueprint today, here are five sectors to explore: 1) Refined petroleum. Dangote addressed Nigeria's import dependency, but most of Africa still imports refined fuel; the continent’s annual import bill on refined petroleum products is estimated at $120B. After its West African success, the Dangote Group is already planning a $15–17B replica refinery in East Africa. 2) Machinery & industrial equipment. Africa builds almost none of its own industrial equipment. Instead it spends an estimated $100B annually importing it. This is perhaps a higher risk, longer-horizon play; but it's also where the highest value-add sits. 3) Food processing & agribusiness. Africa spends over $60B on food imports annually — mostly on raw staple grains like wheat, rice, and maize. Opportunities include domestic production of what's imported, production of indigenous crops as substitutes, agro-processing, and coordination infrastructure like commodity exchanges. 4) Building materials beyond cement. Africa spends ~$35B annually on building materials imports, excluding cement. Dangote conquered cement; the next layer is steel, glass, ceramics/tiles, roofing materials, and finished wood products. Urbanization-led investment is a primary driver, and local manufacturing is generally nascent. 5) Pharmaceuticals. Africa spends over $20B on annual pharmaceutical imports. Half the continent's countries have zero local pharmaceutical manufacturing. A Dangote-scale bet here would mean an internationally certified pan-African supply platform. Of course, the easy part is what I’m doing right now — ideating. The hard part is pouring capital into opportunities that take decades to incubate, in environments where the currency can lose 90% of its value while you're still laying groundwork. That's why most people talk about import substitution or backward integration, while others build refineries. — Afridigest Intelligence — intelligence & advisory to win in Africa's growth markets: afridigest.com/intelligence | Follow Afridigest on LinkedIn & Instagram

Dangote couldn’t find enough trucks in Nigeria for his refinery So he bought 10,000 from China, built a jetty to bring them in, then a 10-lane highway to the port In Africa—whether in tech or infrastructure—you don’t just build the thing You build the things the thing requires

@jbitcoinecon @AlikoDangote @NicolaiTang1 You don’t just build the thing, you build the things the thing requires x.com/eajene/status/…

@eajene @AlikoDangote @NicolaiTang1 Port, roads, housing, water treatment... then the refinery. The infrastructure was the real project. 650K bpd just sits on top.

"The biggest ever." That's @AlikoDangote, Africa's richest man and industrialist-in-chief, describing the moment he decided to build the Dangote refinery — the world's largest single-train oil refinery — in a conversation with @NicolaiTang1, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. The obstacles matched the scale of the project: • Land access was blocked for 5 years by entrenched oil industry interests • 65 million cubic meters of sand had to be dredged • The Nigerian naira collapsed from ₦156 to ₦1,900 to the dollar mid-construction • No port in the country was capable of handling equipment weighing up to 3,000 tons — so they built one • No adequate roads to the project site existed — so they built those too • They also built a 440-million-liter water treatment tank farm and a housing complex that accommodates 50,000 employees and their families Dangote made this surprising admission to Tangen: "Luckily for us, we didn't know what we were building. Because if we knew — If I was faced with the plan and the drawings all at once — I would have chickened out." He added this metaphor: It's like swimming across the ocean and realizing mid-way that the tide is bad. Going forward is hard. Going back is just as hard. So you keep swimming. And they did. Today, the refinery processes 650,000 barrels of oil daily and has transformed Nigeria into a net exporter of refined petroleum products for the first time in the country's history. According to IMF estimates, the Dangote refinery is adding 1.5% to Nigeria's non-oil GDP. Sometimes the most important thing founders can do is not see the full picture too early. And once you do — keep swimming. — Afridigest Intelligence — intelligence & advisory to win in Africa's growth markets: afridigest.com/intelligence | Follow Afridigest on LinkedIn & Instagram

Governments across Africa are increasingly unveiling AI strategies. Meanwhile, 600 million people across the continent still lack access to electricity. Dr. @MutisoRose calls this "radical techno-optimism" — and warns that hard infrastructure work can't be leaped over. "AI is not a classic leapfrog technology. Unlike mobile phones, AI doesn’t bypass infrastructure. It's one of the most infrastructure-intensive technologies you can imagine." Realism or defeatism? Read the post & comments here ➜ linkedin.com/posts/despite-…

The founders who build lasting institutions in African markets are the ones who treat each humbling experience as data rather than defeat. The ones who don’t are the ones who show up with a story and leave with a lesson semafor.com/article/05/11/…

@antonioguterres Controlling resources isn’t enough. What matters is whether you can capture the value those resources create.

For too long, Africa’s resources have been extracted, the value captured elsewhere, the environmental damage left behind. No more exploitation. No more plundering. The people of Africa must benefit - first & most - from the resources of Africa.

Africa is the world's fastest urbanizing region — and for the first time, we have the data infrastructure to see it clearly. Researchers from the Technical University of Munich just created the first high-resolution 3D map of all buildings worldwide. The dataset is called GlobalBuildingAtlas. And for anyone serious about African markets, the Africa findings are worth a look. Africa has an estimated 540 million buildings — 34% more than Europe. But Africa's total building area is ~30% of Europe, while its total building volume is ~15% of Europe. The building volume visualization below helps make this concrete. Look at Paris and Tokyo in the top left of the city panel in the image below, then look at Johannesburg and Cairo directly below them. Paris and Tokyo show verticality: concentrated cores of extreme volume — the deep red clusters — with rings of medium-density development radiating outward. Johannesburg and Cairo tell a different story: Joburg sprawls across a wide footprint but rarely climbs into the highest volume range — horizontal expansion shaped in part by apartheid-era spatial segregation. Cairo has a much denser core but its buildings remain far shorter on average than European and Asian counterparts. This pattern holds across the continent: Africa's buildings are smaller in footprint and disproportionately single-story — and that has implications for investment, infrastructure allocation, and development policy. But one important caveat here: Africa is also the continent where this dataset is least validated. No LiDAR training data exists for the continent so Africa estimates carry more uncertainty than elsewhere. There's a bit of irony there: the continent adding more city-dwellers over the next 30 years than anywhere else is also the one whose urban morphology we understand the least. That gap is an intelligence problem — and an investment one. _ Afridigest Intelligence — turning global datasets into actionable intelligence on Africa's growth markets: afridigest.com/intelligence | Follow Afridigest on LinkedIn & Instagram

@eajene is fascinating to me; founder, scaler, analyst, journalist/commentator and community builder [through @AfridigestHQ] - all rolled into one. So he was an obvious choice for @Wimbart's #TheWimbartWay as he's able to critically look at how the media worked for him when business building and now also, from the other side as a storyteller who's building a powerful and highly influential following, thanks to his compelling writing and attention to detail when analysing African tech companies. Here's a snippet ahead of his upcoming episode, which is out on Thursday 14th May --->

@WimbartHope Thank you! 🙏🏾

More than anywhere else in the world, Africa's internet economy is mobile-first or mobile-only. Just under three-fourths of online traffic on the continent is generated by mobile devices — the highest percentage worldwide. Here are three implications for founders building for African markets: ➊ To succeed, companies need to adopt a mobile-1st approach This means building products optimized for mobile devices, prioritizing solutions that are accessible to users of all skill levels, and experimenting with mobile-only strategies. An example on the latter point comes from Netflix. Five years after its failed entry into Africa, it gave in to this reality and launched a smartphone-only basic plan at ~$2.50 for African users. ➋ Telcos can make or break your distribution. MNOs play an outsized role in Africa's internet economy and builders need to think critically about how to collaborate with them. While the link between M-Pesa and Safaricom is well-known, a lesser known example comes from the e-commerce industry. In December 2013, Jumia sold a 33.3% stake to MTN which was upped to 41.4% a few months later. And from 2015 onwards, MTN zero-rated Jumia traffic with various promotional campaigns in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Uganda & elsewhere, giving an early boost to the pan-African e-commerce platform. ➌ Act online, think offline While African users predominantly access the internet via mobile devices, many are still offline. And for those online, coverage can be spotty & data prices can be high. So builders should think about incorporating offline functionality into their solutions to ensure that users can access & use their products even without internet connectivity. Read the full article, 'Three lessons for founders in Africa’s mobile-first economy' here ➜ afridigest.com/three-lessons-… — Afridigest Intelligence — intelligence & advisory to win in Africa's growth markets: afridigest.com/intelligence | Follow Afridigest on LinkedIn & Instagram

Jumia's journey: The fourth phase is here, by @eajene open.substack.com/pub/afridigest…

“The only reason I’m on this side of the world is storytelling.” @eajene shared this on #TheWimbartWay, with host @WimbartHope Storytelling isn’t just about coverage; it defines who takes you seriously, and how early that starts to happen. Emeka's episode drops this Thursday - subscribe here to be notified when it goes live: @TheWimbartWayPodcast" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@TheWimbartWay… #AfricanTech #StartupStorytelling #TheWimbartWay

In September 2025, I told the @FT that there was a 70% chance of Jumia hitting its 2027 profitability target. Based on the company's Q1 2026 results released this week, those odds look even stronger — but the margin for error has never been thinner. Full analysis ➜ afridigest.substack.com/p/jumias-journ…

Every business starts with a story. For @SwoopAppNG — which announced $7.3M in seed funding at the end of April — that story is building "Africa's first super app" in Lagos, Nigeria. But the company hasn't yet demonstrated a super-app wedge, earned market insights, or operational discipline in one of Africa's megacities. The question is whether the story survives contact with the street. "What was secret is revealed in the marketplace." — Igbo proverb Read my take for @Semafor here ➜ semafor.com/article/05/11/… Thanks to @YinkaWrites & team for the opportunity to share thoughts 🙏🏽

A 19-year old Thiel fellow from Connecticut has raised over $7M to build Africa’s latest ‘first super app’ sparking a furor in Nigeria's tech ecosystem. @eajene explains this is really about the power of narrative over groundbreaking strategy. semafor.com/article/05/11/…

“What was secret is revealed in the marketplace.” — Igbo proverb

@LopesInsights x.com/eajene/status/…

Growth is not all, and GDP limitations are well known. However, despite ODA decline, highest cost of capital, imported inflation and volatile commodity prices, it is a remarkable proof of resilience that Africa is forecasted to attain the best continental world performance in GDP growth.