From Crisis Zones Digital Systems to Market Zones Digital Transition for Africa's Informal Economies

While mostly working abroad over the last decade — in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Switzerland — I visited Nigeria every few months to take intermittent breaks. And every single visit, I faced the same challenges: the struggle of finding reliable services, the frustration of navigating markets with no information to guide you, and the palpable trust deficit that has held back African markets from going digital.

I'd try to find a good plumber. I'd ask a cousin, who'd ask a neighbour, who'd give me a number that might or might not work. I'd go to a market looking for something specific and spend hours navigating stalls because there's no directory, no reviews, no way to know who's trustworthy until after you've already paid. Every visit, the same friction. Every visit, the same thought growing louder in the back of my mind.

Because during those same years, I was building information systems for humanitarian emergencies — platforms that helped hundreds of organisations coordinate, dashboards that tracked millions of services to vulnerable populations, geospatial tools that mapped risk across entire countries. I was solving exactly these problems — fragmented information, invisible actors, broken trust — in some of the world's most complex operating environments.

And I kept asking myself: why can't this power be deployed into the market ecosystem back home?

The realisation didn't come in a single moment. It built up over years of those visits home — each time noticing the same patterns I was solving professionally in crisis zones playing out in everyday Nigerian commerce.

In a humanitarian operation, the core challenge is always the same: too many actors, too little shared information, and no infrastructure connecting them. Organisations collect data in silos. If you want to see the full picture — who's doing what, where, for whom — you have to piece it together manually from dozens of sources.

Now think about an African market. Thousands of sellers, each operating independently. Buyers who have no way to discover them except through personal networks. Prices that vary from stall to stall. Quality that's impossible to assess until after a transaction. Trust that exists only within existing relationships.

It's the same structural problem. Different context, same underlying challenge: how do you create shared visibility, build trust at scale, and connect people who need each other but can't find each other?

The systems I led and managed in my humanitarian career — reporting platforms, geospatial analysis tools, data coordination mechanisms — were all built to make the invisible visible. To create trust where none existed. To connect fragmented actors into a functioning ecosystem.

I started running the idea past a few friends. Could the same systems thinking that powered humanitarian coordination power African commerce? Every conversation made me more convinced. Not just that it was possible — but that it was necessary. That the trust deficit holding back African markets could be addressed with the right digital infrastructure, built by someone who understood the constraints from the inside.

The ambition crystallised: help Africa's markets and service sector transition into the digital phase. Help Africans do business with Africans — with the trust, visibility, and efficiency they deserve.

People sometimes ask me: "What does humanitarian work have to do with building a tech startup?" Everything, it turns out.

Building trust where none exists: In crisis response, trust is oxygen. You build verification systems because decisions affect lives. Partner vetting, beneficiary registration, feedback loops, audit trails — every mechanism exists to ensure that when someone claims something, you can verify it. That same discipline translates directly to marketplace trust. Seller verification. Payment protection. Review systems. Making invisible credentials visible and verifiable. This is exactly what African markets need — a trust infrastructure layer.

Designing for real-world constraints: Humanitarian systems must work on 2G networks, on basic phones, with unreliable power, in areas where infrastructure is a variable you design around, not a given you can assume. African commerce operates under identical constraints. Most platforms fail here because they're designed for environments with stable internet, fixed addresses, and digital payment infrastructure. I spent ten years designing for the opposite. That's an advantage you can't learn from a textbook.

Geospatial intelligence: The same GIS skills I used to map flood risk and identify access routes now help me map market catchment areas, understand population density patterns, and identify underserved commercial zones. MAKKET's dataset of hundreds of Nigerian markets with geolocation data is essentially a humanitarian-style baseline assessment applied to commerce. Every market has a story — population, transportation, seasonal variation, competitive intensity. Map it, understand it, build for it.

Communication that actually works: In the field, I learned that voice messages are how information moves in communities where literacy varies and screens aren't the primary interface. Seventy-eight percent of Nigerians send voice messages daily. That's not a limitation to work around — it's a design specification to build on.

These aren't abstract skills. They're hard-won operational instincts from a decade of building in the world's most challenging environments. And they translate directly to the challenge of digitising Africa's informal economies.

Most marketplace platforms are designed for formal economies. They assume fixed addresses, reliable internet, digital payment accounts, and standardised pricing. These assumptions are so deeply baked into the architecture that most founders don't even realise they're making them.

Nigeria's markets don't work like that. Balogun market does enormous volumes of trade with zero digital records. Sellers communicate through voice messages and personal referrals. Price discovery happens through haggling and relationships, not algorithms. There are no formal addresses — the market is a geography without a coordinate system.

The pattern of failure is predictable: a founder sees an African market, sees "inefficiency," imports a Western marketplace model, spends investor money on user acquisition, and discovers that the entire infrastructure assumption was wrong. The market isn't "digitally backward." It's working perfectly well for how it actually functions.

What's needed isn't disruption. It's enhancement. Start with how the market actually operates and add a digital layer that makes it work better — without trying to replace what's already there. This is what I experienced on every visit home. The markets work. The service providers are skilled. The commerce is vibrant. What's missing is the connective digital tissue that makes it all visible, trustworthy, and scalable.

This is the opposite of importing a model. It's building from first principles — by someone who's lived on both sides of the problem.

This is why I'm building two platforms.

Vendoh is a voice-first AI service marketplace for Nigeria's urban service economy — plumbers, electricians, carpenters, salon professionals, home maintenance providers. It's a massive market where less than 5% of transactions happen on formal platforms. If you need a plumber in Lagos today, you ask a friend — exactly the frustration I experienced on every visit home. Vendoh makes that discovery instant, voice-powered, and trust-protected with escrow payments.

MAKKET digitises Nigeria's physical markets — connecting buyers with traders across hundreds of markets. Unlike e-commerce platforms that try to replace markets, MAKKET enhances the existing ecosystem. It makes discovery possible beyond your immediate neighbourhood, makes seller credentials visible, and creates a digital layer on top of commerce that's been working for generations.

They look like different platforms. But underneath, they share one conviction: Africa's informal economies don't need to be replaced by digital alternatives. They need to be enhanced with digital infrastructure that respects how they already work.

Enhance the market, never displace it. That's the thesis. And it comes directly from a decade of humanitarian work where I learned the hard way that systems succeed when they work with existing realities, not against them.

Africa's informal commerce is a multi-trillion-dollar economy operating almost entirely offline. Street traders, market vendors, service professionals, and micro-entrepreneurs move more capital through person-to-person transactions than many formal financial institutions touch. Yet this entire ecosystem remains invisible to digital platforms.

The biggest untapped opportunity in African tech isn't competing with established platforms — it's building infrastructure for the vast majority of commerce that no platform has reached. Commerce that works perfectly well without digital intermediation, but could be dramatically more powerful with the right digital layer.

We're starting with Nigeria — Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt. Proving the model, measuring what works, then expanding. Not because we're being cautious, but because that's another lesson from humanitarian operations: density before breadth. Go deep in one location before going wide across many.

Looking back, those visits home — the frustration of finding a plumber, the hours lost in markets, the trust deficit I experienced as a customer — weren't just inconveniences. They were the problem statement for everything I'm building now. A decade of building digital systems in crisis zones gave me the tools. Coming home gave me the purpose.

I'm finally helping Africans do business with Africans. With the trust, the visibility, and the digital infrastructure this continent's markets have always deserved.