Five Questions to Ask Before Entering an African Market

Most market-entry conversations start with the wrong question: "how big is the opportunity?" That question matters, but it's rarely the one that determines whether an entry succeeds. The five below are less exciting and far more predictive.

1. Who is our accountable person on the ground, on day one?

Not "which firm are we working with" — which specific person is reachable, in-market, from the first week of the engagement. Organisations that answer this with a name move faster than organisations that answer it with a company logo.

2. What does "done" actually look like for this phase?

Market entry is not one project — it's a sequence: registration, banking, first hires or first vendor relationships, first transaction. Treating it as a single undifferentiated goal makes it impossible to tell whether you're on track. Defining what "done" means for the next 90 days, specifically, is what makes progress visible instead of vague.

3. What's our tolerance for the first plan being wrong?

It will be, in some detail — a regulatory timeline that runs longer than expected, a vendor that doesn't work out, a local partnership that needs renegotiating. This isn't a sign the market entry was miscalculated; it's normal. The organisations that struggle most are the ones whose plan had no room to absorb a wrong assumption and adjust.

4. Are we solving for the first transaction, or for years three through five?

Some early decisions — how you register the entity, who you sign your first lease with, which bank relationship you build — are expensive to unwind later. Others genuinely don't matter long-term and can be decided fast. Knowing which is which, before you're deep into the decision, saves real time and money.

5. What happens when something goes wrong at 6pm on a Friday?

This is the question that separates a real operating partner from a plan on paper. Shipments get held at customs. Payments don't clear. A key local hire gives short notice. The measure of a market entry's resilience isn't whether these things happen — they will — it's whether there's a real person, with real local relationships, who can actually do something about it before Monday.

The practical takeaway

None of these questions show up in a standard market-sizing exercise, and all five of them matter more, in the first year, than whether your total addressable market estimate was precisely right. Get the execution answers right, and the strategy has room to work.