01
African countries trade little with one another
They trade far less with their neighbours than with the rest of the world. It is the opposite of Europe or Asia, and everything else follows from it.
Africa — connecting markets
Djamila Denguir
Connecting African markets to one another, and Morocco to the continent. More than twenty countries, a network built country by country — access that cannot be bought.
The continent
Africa is not worked from an office
Africa must have confidence in Africa.
His Majesty King Mohammed VI — Message to the 27th African Union Summit, Kigali, July 2016
Fifty-four countries, and as many customs regimes, distribution channels and local balances of power. What works in Abidjan fails in Kinshasa; what is decided in Douala is not decided in Libreville. The continent is not handled as one market. It is handled country by country.
Food was my school. It is the least forgiving sector there is: thin margins, partly informal channels, a consumer who weighs every cent, and shelf lives that start running the day the goods leave the plant — every week spent in transit or held at customs is taken from the time left to sell. Learn to read a market through food, and you can read it at all.
Because the questions do not change from one sector to the next. Who actually decides, which price passes, which partner lasts, what gets settled before anything is written. They arise identically for a container of dry goods, a hotel project or an industrial site.
What makes the continent singular lies in a gap: the needs are immense, the capital exists, the agreements are signed — and goods still move poorly from one African country to another. A trade agreement does not move a pallet. Between the signature and the first container, what is missing is almost always an operator, a financing line and someone to make the connection. Morocco is the country best placed to provide all three.
Areas covered
Network
Connecting
My main asset is not a catalogue, it is a network. Relationships built over years with importers, distributors, manufacturers and senior executives across more than twenty African countries.
A network cannot be rented, and it does not transfer through a spreadsheet. It is worked, and it is tested: a door opens because someone answers, not because a name sits on a list.
Profile
Pan-African by conviction
French-Moroccan, I have spent my entire career on export to African markets. It is not a sector I chose by calculation: the continent is what kept me. Every new market is a country to understand before it is a figure to reach, and I have never stopped going to see for myself.
My conviction fits in one sentence: Africa gains by trading with Africa. African products belong on African markets, and what keeps them out is almost never quality or demand — it is the channels, the missing intermediaries and the administrative borders. A product moving from one African country to another creates twice the value of the same product imported from elsewhere: it sustains a producer on the continent and a distributor on the continent.
My strength is not technical, it is human: I put the right people in touch. A producer who does not know he has a buyer two borders away, a developer looking for an operator, an investor looking for a local partner, an executive entering a market where he knows no one yet. The sector matters little: the act is the same — knowing who, knowing when, knowing how to introduce. It is what I do best, and what I enjoy most.
The ground
What you only learn by going
Four realities that appear in no market study.
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01
The given word
A commitment made in person carries the weight of a signed document here. You do not walk away from it because you found better elsewhere.
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02
Reputation
It arrives before you and it remains after you. It is built over years and undone in a single transaction. It is the one asset nobody can sell you.
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03
Discretion
Serious business is settled before it is announced. Those who communicate the most are rarely those who decide.
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04
Representation
You never arrive alone in an African country: you arrive with your own. What you do there commits more than yourself.
Teaching
Four things to know about Africa
I have spoken several times at universities and business schools about African markets. These are the four points I start with.
02
A free trade area is not enough
The continental framework exists. What is missing is not legal: it is operators, financing and logistics. A text does not replace a chain.
03
A large share of trade is invisible
Informal trade weighs heavily in real flows and appears in no official statistics. Anyone reasoning from published figures alone is looking at the wrong market.
04
Currency decides more than demand
In several countries the difficulty is not selling: it is being paid and repatriating funds. A project is judged as much on its foreign-exchange terms as on its market.
Contact
Write
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