The problem with "building for Africa"

The phrase turns up in every other pitch deck and mission statement, and it always sounds ambitious and generous. Building for Africa. It has scale in it, and hope, and the flattering suggestion that you are thinking bigger than everyone else. But underneath the good intentions sits a mistake large enough to quietly sink a product before it has written a line of code, because the phrase treats one of the most varied places on earth as though it were a single, uniform market with a single set of needs.

It is worth actually sitting with how strange the abstraction is. This is a place of more than fifty countries, thousands of languages, and enormous differences in infrastructure, regulation, income, faith, habits, and the specific ways people decide whether to trust a stranger. What works beautifully in Lagos can fail completely in Nairobi, and something that flies in one Nigerian city can stall in the next one along the road, for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the idea and everything to do with the particular texture of that one place. Building for Africa, as a design target, is about as useful as building for a whole hemisphere. It names a region on a map, not a person you could actually picture.

So why does the framing survive, given how obviously it falls apart the moment you look at it? Mostly because it is more convenient for the people doing the building than for the people being built for. It gives an outsider a big, round number to present to investors. It lets ambition feel like strategy. But that convenience is the tell. When an abstraction makes the builder's job feel simpler while making the user harder to see, the abstraction is serving the wrong person, and the product that comes out of it tends to fit the slogan far better than it fits any real human being.

We try to work the other way around, and it is less glamorous by design. We do not build for Africa. We build for a specific person with a specific problem in a specific place, a seller in a particular marketplace who cannot safely trade with a stranger, a person in one city trying to find real work in a sea of noise. The specificity is not a limitation we are apologizing for. It is the entire source of whatever makes the product good, because a thing built precisely for someone real will always serve them better than a thing built vaguely for everyone.

If you catch yourself reaching for a continent, or any market so large it has stopped being a group of people and become a number, try replacing it with a single name in a single place. If you can describe that person, where they are, and what exactly is standing in their way, you have the beginning of a strategy. If you cannot, then building for Africa was never a strategy at all. It was only ever a slogan wearing one.

solveX is a product studio building digital tools for African and diaspora communities across Nigeria and the UK.