Why I'm Betting on African Businesses
The next generation of global institutions will be built by solving high-friction African everyday problems.
“Lagos does not wait for infrastructure. Lagos builds its own infrastructure every single morning.”
If you walk down Balogun Market or through the commercial avenues of Ikeja and Victoria Island, you do not see a lack of entrepreneurial energy. You see the highest concentration of commerce per square kilometer on earth.
What you do see is extreme operational friction. Payment reconciliation is fractured. Inventory is managed on scraps of paper or WhatsApp voice notes. Power dips, cellular latency fluctuates, and trust between anonymous buyers and sellers is hard-won.
Silicon Valley software products are built for an environment of assumed perfection: ultra-fast fiber internet, dispute-free banking, frictionless delivery, and buyers who pull out credit cards without a second thought.
When you take that software and drop it into Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra, it shatters. It is too heavy, too expensive, and assumes conditions that do not exist.
This is why I am building Nile, Sena, and Booq. We are not building copies of Stripe or Shopify. We are building software specifically engineered for the high-friction, cash-flow-conscious realities of African enterprises.
African business owners are the most resilient operators in the world. When you hand them software that actually respects their daily reality, the leverage is exponential.
“When software solves a real operational headache for an African merchant, they do not just use it—they defend it with their livelihood.”
Winner Oyekunle
Founder of Nile, Sena, and Booq. Documenting software building, distribution, and African enterprise realities from Lagos.