If you look at how goods move between Lagos and Abidjan, or inside Cairo on a bad traffic day, you quickly understand that logistics in Africa is not just a routing problem. For decades, it’s been diesel bikes, paper receipts, a broker “who knows a guy” at the border and a lot of informal credit. Tech, so far, has mostly been a thin layer on top of that: tracking links and marketplaces that don’t really touch the underlying cost and risk.

The next chapter looks very different. On one side, fuel prices, congestion and air-quality issues are pushing cities and operators to rethink the fleet. On the other side, you have the rise of e-mobility across the continent and the slow but real build-out of intra-African trade under AfCFTA. There are now hundreds of e-mobility players, especially around electric motorbikes and charging, and a growing interest in fleet electrification. The most interesting models we see are not “new shiny bikes only”, but battery-as-a-service and retrofitting: let people keep the chassis they already own, swap or finance only the batteries, and build a dense swapping network around that. Layer onto this the need for proper logistics rails between Morocco, West Africa and Southern Africa, and it’s clear that by 2026 the winners won’t be courier brands; they’ll be operating systems for moving electrons and goods together.

For years, African logistics has been framed as a routing and marketplace problem: match trucks to loads, digitise brokers, add tracking, done. But operators on the ground describe a different reality. This is where bad roads, politics, customs, FX and liquidity all collide. Margins are thin, relationships are deep, and the real leverage sits with whoever can finance the movement of goods, not with whoever can draw the neatest line on a map.

Transport costs swallow a disproportionate share of final prices across many African corridors, making the region one of the most expensive places to move goods. Yet freight demand is still growing as urbanisation and consumption rise. SMEs and informal distributors sit right in the middle of this system: they struggle to secure reliable capacity, rarely access formal supplier credit, and depend heavily on analogue networks to keep stock moving. The last wave of “asset-light marketplaces” underestimated how much of this industry is about balance sheets and trust, not just software. The next wave will have to lean into that reality: blending platforms with warehouses, vehicles, trade finance, and collections, and accepting that taking real risk on goods and cash is part of the model.

For a long time, logistics and transport in Africa were treated as someone else’s problem: state-owned companies, truckers and informal networks somehow kept things moving. Tech founders often complained about logistics in every board meeting, then treated it as a side note in their own models.

That is no longer viable. African logistics and transport startups have attracted around $1.8bn over the past five years, making the sector one of the largest recipients of venture capital on the continent. In parallel, major infrastructure players are raising hundreds of millions of euros to rehabilitate freight rail and ports. South Africa’s Transnet, for example, recently secured a €300m loan tied to modernising rail and port capacity and shifting freight from road to rail. The message is clear: if you can move goods reliably, everyone else, from fintech and e-commerce to agriculture and health, can build on top. If you cannot, every startup ends up reinventing its own mini-logistics stack country by country.

The next wave of value will accrue to platforms that turn Africa’s physical networks into predictable, data-rich infrastructure.