Guides for entrepreneurs, traders, and freelancers operating across African markets. Covering pricing, cross-border trade, mobile money, and regional regulations.
Beatrice registered her import business in January. By June she had a shop in Kikuubo, three staff, and a supplier relationship in Guangzhou that took months to build. By November she had closed. Not because the products did not sell. They did. She closed because every time she checked her bank balance against what she … Read more
If you’re reading this from a rented apartment in a city where the rent went up again this year, you already know the arithmetic. The paycheck lands, the bills clear it out, and the gap between “working hard” and “getting ahead” doesn’t close no matter how many extra hours you put in. For a lot … Read more
Land at Kigali International Airport on any given morning and the first thing you notice isn’t the hills, though there are a thousand of them rolling toward every horizon. It’s the quiet. No horns. No litter blowing across the tarmac road into the city center. A traffic officer waves a line of motorcycle taxis through … Read more
A trader in Kitwe pays her mobile money withdrawal fee without a second thought, files VAT the way she has for years, and quotes freelance clients the same rate she’s always quoted. None of that math is current anymore. Between January and mid-2026, Zambia quietly rewrote the rules on four fronts at once: mobile money … Read more
A security firm in Nairobi budgeted May and June payroll at the old rates, waiting to see whether President Ruto’s Labour Day announcement would actually become law before changing anything. It was the right instinct and the wrong bet. The Regulation of Wages (General) (Amendment) Order 2026 was gazetted on 26 June, backdated to 1 … Read more
A payroll officer at a mid-sized logistics firm in Lagos ran January 2026 the same way she had run every month for six years: gross salary, minus the Consolidated Relief Allowance, minus pension, then the old bands from 7 to 24 percent. Every payslip that month was wrong. Nigeria’s tax law changed on 1 January … Read more
At a Nairobi packhouse in Murang’a, a cold-chain manager checks the temperature log on a crate of Hass avocados bound for a market Kenya has never shipped to directly. For years, “export” meant Rotterdam, Dubai, or, more recently, Shanghai. It never meant Kingston. That changed on July 13, 2026, when Kenya’s first-ever resident High Commissioner, … Read more
The cedi depreciation 2026 story is stranger than most headlines make it sound. Ghana’s economy grew 6.4% in the first quarter. Inflation eased to 4.6% in July, down from 5.3% in June. Private sector credit surged 41.2%, more than four times faster than a year earlier. By almost every conventional measure, the economy looks stronger … Read more
In a fabric stall off Kingston’s Coronation Market, a trader who has spent a decade importing kente and adinkra cloth from Accra watched President John Dramani Mahama’s motorcade roll past on the evening news. She has no direct way to pay her Ghanaian supplier without routing through three separate services and losing money at every … Read more
Street Food Businesses You Can Start in West Africa By 7 PM on any given weekday, the junctions across Lagos mainland are cloaked in the distinct, spicy smoke of the suya spot. A vendor stands over a long metal grill, rotating skewered beef over hot coals and dusting it with yaji (suya spice) for customers … Read more