Afrimarket Lands €10 Million To Deploy E-commerce Platform Across Francophone Africa

The French e-commerce startup, Afrimarket has raised €10 million from the Global Innovation Fund and the private sector arm of the French Development Agency (AFD), Proparco, as well as from a handful of individual investors such as the co-founder of PriceMinister, Olivier Mathiot, who’s been granted a seat on Afrimarket’s board.

At a glance, the company seems to have it made– except that growth within the e-commerce sector across the continent has consistently failed to meet expectations, and foreign-owned, foreigner-run e-commerce copy-cat plays backed by the likes of Rocket Internet continue to have precious little to show in terms of solid success.

The bottom line is that this is Africa, and Afrimarket’s founder and CEO, Rania Belkahia, better have a few good tricks up her sleeve, including a tonne of patience and access to a lot more cash, if her company is to achieve its ambitious aspiration of dominating the French-speaking West African e-commerce market.

Then, in this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, we share a conversation I had with Ernesto Spruyt, the founder of Tunga, an online market network that provides international clients access to African coding talent. He also happens to serve as Chief Mentor for Telegraph Media Group’s DigitalX accelerator program in Amsterdam.

Ernesto speaks on what prompted him to come to Africa looking for coding talent, and shares some of key things African coders who aspire to having international careers ought to be keeping top of mind.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.

The Konga Conundrum: Is Nigeria’s E-Commerce Industry Stalling?

Who knew that a little quarterly update by a publicly-traded Swedish investment firm could get Nigeria’s e-commerce fraternity all worked up? Not me.

So, as Kinnevik was going about its business last week, the firm released its Second Quarter Report which detailed the performance of its subsidiaries around the world. That simple act of due diligence on Kinnevik’s part (which admittedly is something that happens every quarter without fail, but only garnered media attention in Nigeria this time round) allowed us all to get a sense of just how well Nigeria’s biggest e-commerce platform, Konga, is doing— which in turn fuelled speculation around the health of Nigeria’s e-commerce sector in general.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation contained in the report was that Konga only has 184,000 active customers— which translates to approximately 1.1% of the Nigerian population. In a word, that number is disappointing. It has lead to vigorous debate both on social media and in the blogosphere about why Nigeria’s e-commerce industry appears to be stalling, and what interventions may be required to turn the situation around.

This week’s African Tech Round-up features a chat I had with Nigerian angel investor and economics commentator, Eloho Omame, whose eloquent blog post on Medium entitled Thoughts around Kinnevik’s half year report and the e-commerce industry in Nigeria has to be one of the more balanced and constructive reviews of the current state of play in Nigeria’s e-commerce scene.

Listen in to hear Eloho unpack the insights laid out in her blog post, and explain why she believes that capital, capital and more capital might be just the thing to help Nigeria’s e-commerce industry live up to the great expectations currently placed upon it.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.