What building in Nigeria taught me about Francophone Africa: Notes from a serial entrepreneur

I am from Benin. I built my business in Lagos.

Those who are aware of these two facts usually ask why. The honest answer is that Nigeria breaks things faster, and breakdown is the best teacher infrastructure can have. A naira that has lost more than two-thirds of its value in 18 months. Multiple entities, multiple banks, a tax system undergoing reform, and a finance team trying to close a month while the ground shakes beneath the figures. You don’t learn to build control systems in calm markets. You learn it where the lack of control costs you something that very week.

So when I look at Francophone West Africa today, the region I come from, I don’t see it the way most of the capital does. I see it through the lens of what Lagos taught me. And what Lagos taught me through experience is that almost everyone reads the Francophone market backwards.

Here’s the story you’ve heard. Francophone Africa is lagging behind. In 2024, it accounted for roughly 10% of African venture capital , down from 15% the previous year, while Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt absorbed the vast majority. Fewer fintechs, more conservative banks, and a thinner pipeline at every stage after seed.

All of this is true. And almost none of it means what people think it means.

Take a closer look at the facts, and the “lag” narrative falls apart. The eight WAEMU countries now have approximately 248 million registered e-money accounts. They processed over 11 billion e-payments in 2024, compared to 260 million a decade earlier, and financial inclusion has grown from less than 15% twenty years ago to around 74%. This is not a primitive market. It is a market that has climbed a curve almost to the top, and is judged as if it were the only curve that exists.

Stephen Deng of DFS Lab wrote about the ” frontier blindspot ,” the tendency to overestimate the speed of digital progress in Africa while underestimating those who are building it. There’s a French-language version, and it’s more specific. People confuse a market’s position on a single curve with its position on all curves.

Because there isn’t just one S-curve of African fintech. They are stacked.

The first curve represents consumer payments: wallets, transfers, and the leap beyond the bank branch. Wave charted this course in Senegal, and Djamo is charting it for over a million users in Ivory Coast and Senegal. The second curve represents business payments: the large-scale movement of money to employees and suppliers, with the infrastructure laid by companies like Julaya and HUB2, now known in Abidjan as the Stripe of Francophone Africa. The third curve is the one almost no one has yet climbed: the financial operating system, the layer that allows a company to truly control how its money moves. Expenses, cash flow, payroll, compliance, audit trail, and closing. Not moving the money, but the more delicate task of governing it.

The gap is most clearly illustrated by one absurd fact. A company in Dakar and a company in Abidjan share a currency but still can’t easily pay each other without friction, fees, or a finance team manually reconciling the results. For many businesses here, WhatsApp is the payment dashboard. The infrastructure is mature. There’s no control over what flows through it.

Anglophone Africa is halfway along this third curve, and it is climbing it the hard way, bolting control over a decade of accumulated disorder. Francophone Africa is read as lagging behind because it is judged on the first two curves. But the third has barely begun anywhere on the continent. And the structural configuration dismissed as the region’s weakness is, for this curve, Africa’s cleanest foundation.

Consider what the bloc actually is: eight countries, one currency, one central bank, one accounting language. The revised OHADA framework means that a company in Cotonou and a company in Abidjan close their books according to the same rules, mandatory since 2018. There is no equivalent anywhere else on the continent. In Anglophone Africa, crossing a border means a new currency, a new regulator, a new accounting system—a whole new world. In the WAEMU, the difficult part is already solved.

The currency tells the same story. The CFA franc’s peg to the euro was mocked for years as a colonial relic. Then the naira plummeted by 70%, and the mockery died down. When you’re building systems whose entire purpose is to ensure the reliability of next quarter’s figures, a stable unit of account is not a minor detail. It’s the foundation upon which everything rests.

Thomas Sankara understood this in Burkina Faso, a member of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). He reduced his own salary, sold the state’s fleet of Mercedes to provide his ministers with the cheapest cars on the market, and required the government to account for its spending. He treated financial discipline as a form of sovereignty rather than a mere bureaucratic chore. Controlling money is not administrative hygiene. It determines who truly holds power within an organization. The continent has always known this when it was inconvenient and forgotten it as soon as a spreadsheet seemed efficient enough.

So what did Lagos teach me about crossing the border?

Not the product. The product can’t be copied and pasted, and founders who make that assumption keep getting stuck on the French-language front, defeated by the language, the legal systems, and a central bank that, despite the single currency, still grants licenses on a country-by-country basis. What is transferred is systems thinking. You design in such a way that mistakes become structurally impossible, not just discouraged. You build for failure, not for growth, because the market that tests you is the real one, not the idealized one in a pitch. You stop trying to solve a control problem by hiring more cautious people. I’ve seen good teams try this for years before accepting that the team was never the variable.

The other thing that is being transferred is the muscle of compliance, and this is where the window of opportunity closes silently. Since the beginning of 2024, the BCEAO (Central Bank of West African States) has required every payment provider to hold a license or cease operations. The bar is high: one hundred million CFA francs in capital, genuine governance, cybersecurity, and anti-money laundering controls. By the end of 2025, across eight countries and approximately 140 million adults, only about thirty institutions had met this requirement, two each in Benin, Burkina Faso, and Mali.

In this market, regulation, not the product, becomes the bulwark. With a license, you can become systemic. Without it, you’re capped, regardless of how attractive your application looks. The discipline Nigeria imposed on us—building under tax reform and with a regulator who doesn’t flinch—is precisely the muscle that this moment is rewarding.

The slogans are already appearing. “Financial Operating System” is an expression now heard in Abidjan. But a category isn’t won by the company that first names it. It’s won by the one that can actually operate it, through eight different legal frameworks, under a regulator that tightens the rules, for a finance team that wants only one thing: to close the books. Naming it costs little. Building a version that survives an audit, however, does not.

And it’s more scalable here than anywhere else on the continent for a boring but crucial reason. You build it once, against a single accounting framework, a single currency, the logic of a single regulator, and it reaches 130 million people across eight markets. In Anglophone Africa, that same ambition requires rebuilding at every border.

The window is the only thing that isn’t permanent. Right now, there’s no established financial system to displace, no decades-old legacy software to tear down, and the regulatory landscape is still wide open. It’s the leapfrog, the same one that consumer payments have already accomplished, only one step higher. It remains open until two things close it: the legacy layer that forms and the licenses that are granted. Both arrive silently, then all at once.

The question, therefore, is not whether Francophone Africa is catching up with Anglophone markets. That formulation reveals a blind spot. The question is whether the lesson these markets paid so dearly to learn—that control is about infrastructure and not personnel—is reaching Francophone Africa while its foundations are still so pristine.

Markets that appear to be lagging the most are sometimes simply at the bottom of a different curve. The only thing that decides is which one starts to climb first.

A’chille Cossi Arouko