Most Africa market-entry decisions are made on a commercial thesis and validated with a security annex. The organisations that get entry right run those tracks in parallel, because the questions that make or break the investment are as much about political and security judgement as they are about market opportunity.
The five questions
- Who really holds power — and how does that map onto the counterparties you would depend on?
- How does the security environment translate into cost of doing business, and where does that cost concentrate?
- What does the compliance and corruption picture look like at the level of the deal you are actually doing?
- Where are the state's monopoly-of-force gaps, and how do they affect people, assets and information?
- What is your defensible exit posture — commercially, physically, reputationally — if the environment deteriorates?
Getting these answered properly
None of these questions can be answered from a desk. They require ground truth: local sources, ex-official networks, unbiased security perspective and independent political-economy work. Where they are answered honestly, market entry becomes a manageable programme. Where they are skipped, exit is what gets planned instead.
The cost of the assessment is always smaller than the cost of the assumption it corrects.
How we support market-entry decisions
Our market-entry work sits between the commercial diligence and the board decision. We build a defensible, source-attributed view of the political, security and integrity landscape at the level of the transaction — not the country brochure — so that the board can commit or walk away with clarity.