Africa is not one market

The phrase arrives in almost every pitch deck I am sent: "the African market." Singular. One billion people, one opportunity, one go-to-market plan. It is a convenient fiction, and it is the most expensive assumption an outside operator can make.

There is no African market. There are dozens of national markets, each with its own regulator, its own currency risk, its own reimbursement logic and its own distribution reality. South Africa is not Nigeria. Kenya is not Egypt. A registration strategy that works in one can be irrelevant in the next. Treating the continent as a single addressable unit is how capital gets deployed against an average that exists nowhere.

The operators who do well start from the opposite premise. They pick one market, learn its specific machinery, build a real position, and only then ask which adjacent market shares enough structure to be worth the next move. Sequencing beats breadth. The harmonisation efforts now underway, a single medicines agency, mutual recognition, regional trade frameworks, are slowly making the continent more like one market than it was. But that is a destination, not the current map. Plan for the map you are actually standing on.

This is a working draft. The full piece is in progress.