Spent too much bucks sending cartoned homeware from suburban Kumasi to downtown Montreal? It’s no different from ordering items from Amazon to an emerging African metropolis, say, a few years ago: there are way too many charges involved and waiting for that rather unquestionable shoe to drop can often be a sharp pain in the pinky toe.
Long story briefed, African trade is irked by numerous inherent hamstrings, and punching through the barriers is no walk across a well-mowed lawn.
Inherent hamstrings? This region’s trade deficit conundrum mostly falls back to the simple reality that its regions do more of external trading than—actually—sharing value with one another.
It’s why there are hardly any well-developed or time-defiant supply chain systems in the continent. In turn, this deficit is a major drawback for the early-stage companies attempting to connect the various dots of intra-African trade.