Welcome to African Hustle! Your bi-weekly dose of inspiration and smart insights into African entrepreneurship — featuring real stories about tech, culture, startups, founders, and innovations shaping the future of the continent.

Africa holds approximately 70–80% of the world’s phosphate reserves, primarily concentrated in North Africa, specifically in Morocco, which alone holds around 67.5% of global reserves, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. However, Many African countries are dependent on fertiliser imports from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. South Africa alone imports over 80% of its fertilisers from overseas, valued at US$1.14 billion in 2025

Let me tell you something most entrepreneurs do not want to hear when they are full of ambition, energy, and vision.

Your business probably needs to get smaller before it gets bigger.

I know that sounds wrong. You are thinking about scale and reaching the whole country. You are imagining thousands of customers, multiple product lines, maybe even regional expansion. Fair enough, that is what entrepreneurs do.

But many businesses fail because the focus was too big at the onset.

You do not build a successful company by trying to be useful to everyone on day one. You build it by becoming indispensable to someone specific.

In other words, you need to start with a specific niche. That is the first brutally simple growth play. Start narrow, win big, then scale. Not start broad, struggle loudly, and call it hustle.

Our African markets are fragmented. Building trust, distribution and reliability is important.

In many sectors, the business that wins is not the one with the grandest branding or the most inflated pitch deck. It is the one that shows up, delivers consistently and becomes known in one niche for not disappointing.

In trust-sensitive and informal environments, professionalism and dependable execution are keys to success.

So let me put it plainly.

You do not need to capture Africa first.

You need to own one street. One district. One customer type. One use case. One narrow problem that people encounter enough to pay for repeatedly.

PayPal's initial use case was allowing individuals to send and receive money via email using a web browser. It did not begin as some vague dream to reinvent global finance.

M-PESA, one of the clearest African examples of scale, did not become what it became by trying to be everything at once. M-Pesa's initial, intended use case was to provide a system for microfinance borrowers to conveniently receive and repay loans using the network of Safaricom airtime resellers.

That is the pattern.

Not a broad appeal first. Its precise usefulness first.

So if you are in business right now, ask yourself this question.

“Which exact customer should find me impossible to ignore?”

That question will change your offer, because now you are not selling a general service. You are solving a specific pain.

It changes your marketing, because now your message can be direct.

It changes your operations because when you serve the same type of customer over and over, you get faster, cleaner, and more profitable.

And it changes your reputation, because in a focused market, word travels.

Most niches lie in boring industries. Aliko Dangote is eying $100 billion in revenue by 2030, and none of the industries he is invested in is sexy.

Do not ignore the ordinary. The ordinary may be where the money is.

This is where many entrepreneurs lose the plot.

Too many people want sexy businesses. They want innovation that photographs well on LinkedIn. They want the kind of company that sounds impressive at networking events. They want buzz.

Meanwhile, cash is being made in industries people overlook.

Maintenance, logistics, repairs, cleaning, distribution, packaging, agro-processing, water delivery, waste collection, cold chain, fleet servicing and industrial supplies.

These are business services nobody brags about.

You know what these businesses have that glamorous ideas often do not?

Demand.

Recurring demand for that matter.

When we say the African market is fragmented, this is as much an opportunity as it is a bottleneck for others.

When you build a small business, the challenge should be to standardise operations so that they are repeatable. That way, the fragmentation ceases to be the obstacle.

Build a playbook so repeatable that you can scale it.

That playbook might help you open a second branch. It might help you franchise. It might help you acquire a competitor.

For every 20 customers, stop and ask yourself:

Then write it down.

Turn it into a checklist.

Train somebody else on it.

Improve it.

That is how businesses become scalable. Not through motivation quotes. Through repeatable systems.

Do not obsess about being known by everybody. Aim to be trusted by the right people.

A lot of entrepreneurs secretly believe that once they get seen, funded, endorsed, or discovered, everything will click.

But businesses in our environment often live or die on cash discipline. Do not build a business depending on some future funding event.

Know your margins.

Know your collections cycle.

Know which customers delay payment.

Know where the leakage is.

Know what it costs to deliver, not what you wish it costs.

So here is the conversation I would hope you to have with yourself after reading all this.

Maybe you do not need a bigger dream right now.

Maybe you need a tighter one.

Maybe the next level of your business is not another idea.

Maybe it is a better positioning.

Cleaner execution.

A more reliable offer.

A more specific customer.

A more disciplined system.

And maybe the company you want to build in five years starts with the market you are still too proud to dominate today.

That is the part many founders miss.

Small, done properly, is often how big begins.

In spring 2027, Eisenhower Fellowships will assemble a diverse group of visionaries from across the globe and invite them to the United States for a unique, nearly six-week program with both in-person and virtual components.

Fellows are selected based on their track record of leadership, their potential for future impact and their commitment to lifelong engagement with Eisenhower Fellowships to advance our mission of enhancing international understanding through dialogue to build a world more peaceful, prosperous and just.

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Nigerian-born Tony O. Elumelu is one of Africa’s leading investors and philanthropists on the continent. He began his career as a copier salesman.

Adji Bousso Dieng is a Senegalese computer scientist and statistician, working as an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Dieng leads the lab Vertaix on research at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and the natural sciences.

She is also a research scientist at Google DeepMind and the founder and president of the nonprofit The Africa I Know.

In her lab, Dieng and team are pioneering a field she calls ‘Vendi Scoring,’ which explores the concept of diversity and its applications across various scientific domains, including AI.

Kamoto kamberevere kakapisa matanda mberi (Shona proverb)

Translation: A small, slow-burning fire can burn down large logs later

Meaning: Minor, ignored problems can escalate into major catastrophes if not addressed immediately

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