Past the Headlines: The Relationship Comes Before the Deal

Article 1 of a series on making Africa actionable as a market

Every week on LinkedIn, I see another thought piece about Africa. Africa is rising. Africa is being left behind. Africa needs fintech. Africa needs infrastructure. Africa is the next China. Africa is still colonised. Africa is leapfrogging. Africa is stagnating.

None of these are wrong. None of them are actionable. I want to start asking the next question. There is real opportunity in that gap and this series is my attempt to find it.

The challenge is the unit of analysis. Africa is a continent of 1.4 billion people across 54 countries, 8 major language families, and economies ranging from oil-dependent states to landlocked subsistence economies to mid-tier manufacturing hubs. Trying to draw a single business conclusion from that is a bit like averaging Tokyo, Kabul, and Dhaka into one data point and calling it an "Asia strategy." The average exists, but it tells you almost nothing useful, and this is not a geopolitics lecture, just the minimum context needed to think clearly about the market.

This series takes one recurring theme at a time and asks the only questions that matter: which Africa? Under what conditions? For whom? I'll write from what I know directly, Morocco, with threads into South Africa, and I'd invite anyone working in other African markets to take what resonates and pressure-test it against their own context.

The first theme is customer relationships. Not because it's the most dramatic, but because it's the most foundational. Get this wrong and everything downstream, your sales approach, your partnerships, your reputation, gets harder than it needs to be.

Thinner institutions, thicker relationships

There is a particular kind of business failure that doesn't show up in post-mortems. No bad product, no pricing problem, no operational gap. The deal just doesn't happen. And if you ask carefully enough, you eventually hear something like: I don't want to work with that person.

Not that person's company. Not that person's offer. That person.

In a Western business context, this gets filed under "unprofessional." In a relationship-driven market, it is simply the logic of how trust works.

Your network is your due diligence

The distinction worth making here is not that African markets are emotional and Western markets are rational. That framing is lazy and inaccurate in both directions. Western business culture is full of relationship dependencies, it has simply built institutional layers on top of them. Contracts, liability frameworks, and review systems exist partly to make transactions possible between people who don't know each other and may not like each other. The institution substitutes for the relationship.

In Morocco, and in many African markets, that substitution is thinner. The relationship is not a complement to the business structure. In many contexts, it is the structure. Which means the personal dimensions of a business interaction carry operational weight, not just social weight. Whether someone likes you, trusts you, or has heard something about the people around you, these are due diligence.

This is visible at the B2B level in the way decisions get made. It is equally visible at the B2C level in how businesses and customers interact publicly, in feedback, in responses to complaints, in the texture of how a brand speaks. The business is rarely faceless here. There is almost always a person behind it, and that person is present in the exchange.

What travels with your name

The practical implication for anyone entering or operating in these markets is not "be more likeable." It is something more structural: your reputation travels through your network, not just through your work. The people you partner with, the people you're seen with, the people who speak about you, these carry information in this market that a pitch deck or a portfolio doesn't.

That means partnerships deserve more due diligence than they typically get from international entrants. Not just "is this person competent?" but "what does this association signal, and to whom?" A local partner who opens doors in one circle may quietly close them in another. This is not a problem to be solved. It is a dynamic to be understood before you make commitments.

It also means that relationship damage travels further and faster than most people expect. A soured deal, a public dispute, a badly handled customer complaint, these don't stay contained. They move through the relational web that underpins the market.

The next piece is about loyalty, what it looks like when the relationship is already the structure.

The map I'm drawing has gaps. Where does this land for you? Same dynamic, different country, or something completely different? Help me fill them in. Drop a comment or send me an email.