Your Next Great Value Play
The meat of the affair: where Value creation opportunities sit in African Continental trade!
If you’ve been keeping up with the last few editions, you’re at a basic level awareness of what’s going on inside African cross-border trade: you see why it’d be compelling to you as an SME, and you at least know where the door is to come in!
Now we must delve deeper, and you know my maxim: if there’s something happening, there’s a way to create Value within that something, sitting right beside it!
So, now that you know there’s a party in African continental trade, what and where are the Value creation opportunities that you can leverage?
I’ve got 2 great examples to share; one fantastic for non-physical services and the other great for physical product-based businesses!
Become the digital bridge
Here’s the thing: African continental trade has always been a thing, but it’s also remarkably… clunky.
What I mean by this is that A LOT of parts in the cross-border trading process are mediated by processes that haven’t seen real updates since the last industrial revolution. Some nations lag further behind than most, and even the most savvy and resourced enterprises in those nations (and those wanting to trade into those nations) will simply be tripped up by a lack of crucial tools that could facilitate their continental trade interactions.
This is where you come in as a services-based business! What these enterprises need are solutions that would help ease those burdens and close those gaps.
Think along these lines:
developing digital financial platforms, offering digital finance tools and services that ease the entire money-moving wahala between countries
developing an e-commerce logistics platform and offering, partnering with e-commerce enterprises to handle last-mile logistics within target countries (especially pertinent with the growing e-commerce market in Africa)
provide market intelligence for target countries, with a particular focus on how they could leverage ‘digital-forward’ operations in those nations
Participate in regional value chains
Ooh baby if you’re a product-based business, especially in any kind of manufacturing or raw-materials processing, then you’ll have heard the term value chains more often than you can count. In fact, I bet that’s what you expected I’d be talking about when you came across this newsletter! Boy were you shocked, I bet!
In any case what even is the deal about value chains, and why would they be a value creation hotspot? Well that one’s easy: you make more money if you put in more effort into processing raw products into higher quality products.
But the specific Value creation for you depends on what you process, and which industry you put that processed product. Here’s some really good ones that already have established value chains that you can join:
Automotive industry:
processing raw animal hides to leather, and leather into specific creations for car interiors and components
manufacturing sustainable and natural materials to be used as eco-safe alternatives for vehicle components
Agro-processing:
processing raw cotton and plant fibres into textiles and woven products, to be a supplier for large shopping chains
processing harvested food into packaged final products to supply airlines, long distance railways, etc.
That brings our delve into the very basics of African continental trade! I hope you had a great time learning, and that you’ll either consider jumping into it with fervour or put these editions in the hands of someone who’s been contemplating getting into it
If you’re hankering for more, I have great news: I’ll be talking about African continental trade and that particular economy in a more detail in Season 2 of my podcast, Inside Value, coming in Q4 2026!
Like my work? You can get more of it!
Listen to my podcast, Inside Value, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube
(be sure to subscribe!)Book me to speak or host a workshop at your event, company or organization
Check out our Value creation work over at Vivre Consulting
Connect with me on LinkedIn!