Ask any founder who has built a business across different African markets, and they would agree the continent’s digital market is fragmented. The fragmentation shows up in how people pay, how businesses are regulated, consumer behaviour, and how digital services are delivered.
Companies also face different licencing requirements, tax regimes, data rules, infrastructure availability, and consumer behaviours as they move from one country to the next. Even within a single country, the rules can sometimes change from one city to another.
Norebase’s State of Expansion in Africa 2026 report offers a glimpse into just how different those markets can be. Based on data from more than 40,000 companies that have expanded through its platform, the report found differences in how long it takes to establish a business across African countries, as well as the rules and requirements companies have to navigate.
Yango Group, a Dubai-headquartered company that provides digital services, including mobility, delivery, foodtech, and entertainment across over 30 countries, has had to contend with many of those differences as it expands across African markets.
However, Adeniyi Adebayo, the company’s Chief Business Officer, sees the fragmentation differently. In an interview with TechCabal in October, he argued that while Africa is undoubtedly fragmented, the differences are more nuanced than they are often made out to be.
“Yes, there is a little bit of fragmentation across the board, but beyond that, I don’t necessarily think fragmentation in and of itself is a bad thing,” he said. “ Fragmentation also leads to resilience in a lot of ways. If you have super centralised systems, when they collapse, the entire thing collapses.”
One platform, different realities
Yango’s response to that fragmentation is putting local adaptations on top of a shared technology base and working with governments on rules that can influence them.
“When people think about how to adapt local technologies to local businesses and local context in Africa, typically the most interesting thing they do is to translate the app,” Adebayo said. “We think language is just one of the components. It’s an important component for sure, but it’s just one of the components for localising businesses and for demonstrating the diversity that exists on the continent.”
Such diversity is visible in Yango’s ride-hailing business, where the digital service is tied to physical systems that can differ from one market to another. The app may be the same starting point, but the vehicles, drivers, roads, payment systems, and rules surrounding each trip in each country are not.
In Ethiopia, taxi drivers commonly use small meters in their cars to track kilometres and calculate fares, which drivers and passengers use to understand the cost of a trip. A ride-hailing service entering the market has to account for a system familiar to both sides of the transaction. Adebayo explained that Yango chose to build around that practice rather than replace it, allowing customers to flag down a car, enter the vehicle’s number into the Yango app, and have the journey logged digitally.
The transportation itself can also look different. In Mozambique, tuk-tuks or txopelas, three-wheeled vehicles for local transport, are an important part of the local transport system, so Yango operates them alongside other vehicles on its platform.
“Everywhere we go, we think about how we can make technology super malleable so that we can essentially bend it to the will or the culture of the place where we operate,” Adebayo said. “No two markets are the same, but there’s a shared technology foundation and then the adaptations that we put on top of them.”
Cities, not just countries
Although markets differ, Yango still has to decide where those differences create an opportunity worth pursuing. Before launching in a market, Yango says, it spends time there. In May, Adebayo spoke to TechCabal on the sidelines of the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali about the company’s plan for the continent. He described a model that enters a market through its densest commercial city, builds a profitable business there and uses it to fund an expansion into smaller cities.
“We look at cities because cities are the engines of growth,” he said. “Few African countries have many large cities, and a lot of the economic activities happen in the cities.”
Within a city, Yango looks for what Adebayo calls accelerants—conditions that make a digital service more likely to gain traction. Population density and the concentration of economic activity are part of that calculation, likewise the pace of urban growth and the demand emerging around it.
He said the company considers the population age and where young people spend their time, whether universities, restaurants, bars or clubs, as younger consumers are more likely to experiment with new services.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s economy is forecast to grow 4.3% in 2026, according to the World Bank, but per capita income growth is expected to reach only 1.8%. The data suggests that rising output is not yet translating into much more spending power for the average household.
Yango’s assessment of a market’s readiness for its product is not one-off, according to Adebayo. A city that is not commercially attractive today may become more viable as internet access becomes cheaper, purchasing power improves, urban activity increases, or consumers become more accustomed to digital services.
“You gather context, and then understand when that context gives you enough conviction that you can plug in a technology to solve some of the city’s problems,” he said.
The rules are harder to localise
Adapting a service to local habits is one thing, but adapting it to different rules is harder because regulation determines what a company can build and how it can operate. Adebayo argued that regulatory inconsistency is the deeper layer of Africa’s fragmentation, with differences in governance and policy eventually spilling into technology and infrastructure.
“What you see as payment fragmentation is actually a downstream [effect] of the fact that there is a fragmentation in policy, not the other way around,” he said. “The fragmentation in the payment sector or other sectors is from the fact that you don’t have very similar regulations, which are engineered by different administrations and differences in the system of governance.”
For a company operating across multiple jurisdictions, that can mean repeating processes already completed elsewhere. That makes regulation different from the other forms of localisation Yango can control. Adebayo said Yango has been involved in policy development around some of the businesses it operates, particularly when it enters a market early enough to contribute to the conversation.
“The reason we have the fragmentation is not because of the solutions that have been created, but because the solutions have been forced by the policies that have been made, and the policies have been made with all of the right intentions but without the right context,” he said.
This is where Yango believes its experience across markets can be useful. In Côte d’Ivoire, Adebayo said Yango worked with the government on a system that allows the platform to act as a tax agent for individual drivers, while the government issues tax IDs and recognises their income. Adebayo said the model has also been implemented in Zambia.
Still, he believes that Africa’s young population and appetite for new services travel across the continent more easily than a payment system or a regulatory framework. Africa has the world’s youngest population, with more than 400 million young people aged 15 to 35. He describes the youthful energy across African markets as a common thread, even when the conditions around it differ.
The commonality underpins Yango’s long-term expansion strategy across the continent. In May, the company announced plans to invest at least $150 million in African expansion, including entering 10 additional markets. In September, it held the 2026 edition of its Pan-African Fellowship, which provides technical training and mentorship to participants who are solving problems in their communities.
Yango is betting that enough of the continent’s cities will develop the population and demand to support digital services, while the company can keep adapting its technology to navigate different market conditions.
“We want to go very deep in our existing markets, and we want to expand into new high-growth markets on the continent,” Adebayo said. “Our job is to take global technologies, enrich them with the context and our knowledge of operating on the continent, and build products and businesses across all of these cities.”
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