Stop evaluating Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire.

Most teams entering Africa make the same mistake.

They pull a national TAM, look at country-level GDP, ask “is this market ready for us?”, and build the go/no-go from there.

But when they arrive the market looks nothing like the spreadsheet.

Because the country is almost never the real unit of analysis.

The city is.

Take Côte d’Ivoire.

On paper, it is a country of about 34 million people. But Abidjan alone has around 6.3 million people and drives a huge share of national economic activity through its port and commercial base.

No other city in the country comes close.

So the buyer in Abidjan does not behave like the national average. Their purchasing power, urgency, networks, and expectations are completely different from someone just a few hours away.

When you average that into one “country” number, you distort the whole picture.

And your pricing, sales motion, channel strategy, and regulatory assumptions all start from the wrong place.

This is not just true in Côte d’Ivoire.

Lagos is not Nigeria.

Nairobi is not Kenya.

Accra is not Ghana.

In most African markets, the real opportunity sits in one or two dense commercial nodes. That is where the buyers are. That is where the partners are. That is where the regulator actually picks up the phone.

The mistake is trying to answer, “Is this country ready?”

The better question is:

Which city should we win first?

Who are the five buyers that matter there?

Who controls distribution?

What does the regulatory path look like in that specific node?

And can that city become the anchor for the rest of the market?

We have run market-entry work across 13 African markets. The national number has almost never told the real story.

The opportunity usually lived in one city.

Sometimes two.

And you would never see that from a desk in Boston, London, or Dubai.

Someone has to be in the city. Talking to the buyers. Testing the channels. Understanding who actually matters.

If your market-entry thesis is built only on country-level data, you are probably pricing the wrong unit.

You do not need a bigger spreadsheet.

You need a better map.

Happy to show you what a city-level read looks like.