Every so often, I have a podcast conversation that reminds me that some of the most important business stories in Africa are not being told loudly enough.

They are not always found in pitch decks, startup demo days, glossy boardroom presentations, or the usual digital transformation conferences. Sometimes, they are found in the routes that move soap, cooking oil, airtime, fertilizer, groceries, and farm inputs from formal manufacturers into the dukas, kiosks, agrovet stores, market stalls, and rural trading centres where Africa’s economy actually lives every single day.

My recent conversation with Farayi Ziswa on the Pure Digital Passion Podcast was one of those conversations.

Farayi is a Zimbabwean-born business strategist, sales transformation leader, entrepreneur, and author whose career spans more than two decades across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He is the Founder and Executive Director of BTL Consulting Ltd, Co-Founder of Mapepa Karatasi in Tanzania, Founder and Executive Coach at Inheritege Coaches, and the author of Selling to Informal Markets, a practical corporate blueprint for successfully selling to Africa’s informal retailers.

But what makes Farayi’s story so compelling is not simply the length of his career or the impressive list of organisations he has worked with. It is the fact that his career has been spent where African commerce becomes real.

He has worked at Unilever. He has run modern trade in Southern Africa. He has sat on the retail side at SPAR Zimbabwe. He has led trade marketing teams across Dubai and the GCC. He has built field teams using mobile technology. He has advised multinationals trying to understand informal retail. He was part of the Copia Global story. He invested in and led Farm Shop, an agrovet franchise chain that served small-scale farmers across Kenya. And through BTL Consulting, he has helped some of the world’s biggest FMCG companies reach informal markets more intelligently.

In other words, Farayi has not simply studied Africa’s informal markets. He has worked inside them, sold into them, built systems around them, and trained people to serve them.

That is why this conversation mattered.

The Informal Market Is Not A Problem To Be Solved

One of the biggest mistakes many formal businesses make in Africa is assuming that informal markets are a temporary inconvenience.

They look at dukas, kiosks, market stalls, informal distributors, small wholesalers, mobile traders, and fragmented retail networks and see inefficiency. They see a lack of structure. They see a market that needs to be “formalised”, “digitised”, or “upgraded” into something that looks more familiar to corporate eyes.

But that approach is often wrong.

The informal market is not simply a problem waiting for formal systems to rescue it. It is a deeply sophisticated commercial ecosystem. It has its own rhythms, trust networks, credit systems, pricing logic, consumer behaviour, distribution relationships, and survival instincts.

It is also where a very significant part of Africa’s daily economic activity happens.

Farayi’s core argument, which came through clearly in our conversation, is that if you want to sell successfully in Africa, you have to respect the informal market as a market in its own right. You cannot just impose formal trade logic on it and expect it to behave like a supermarket chain.

This is where many brands struggle.

They build sales strategies around boardroom assumptions rather than field intelligence. They underestimate the importance of proximity. They overestimate the power of brand awareness. They fail to understand cash flow at the micro-retailer level. They ignore the practical realities of stock rotation, price sensitivity, small pack sizes, distributor incentives, and daily consumer purchasing behaviour.

Then they wonder why their products do not move.

As Farayi explains through his work, selling into informal markets requires discipline. It requires structure. It requires data. It requires people on the ground. It requires technology. But above all, it requires humility.

The informal market is not waiting to be discovered by corporates. It has always been there. The real question is whether formal businesses are willing to learn how it actually works.

From Zimbabwe To Unilever: Learning Commerce From The Ground Up

One of the most fascinating parts of Farayi’s story is that his commercial education did not begin in a corporate training room. It began much earlier, growing up around a family farm in Zimbabwe.

In our conversation, he spoke about taking on administrative responsibilities at a very young age, including payroll and operational tasks. That early exposure to the realities of running a farm gave him a practical understanding of money, labour, supply, demand, and local economic systems long before he entered the formal world of business.

He later studied at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom, completing a degree in Business Accounting and an MBA in Financial Management. That finance background is important because it gave him a numbers-driven foundation. But what is interesting is how his career evolved from finance into sales, distribution, trade marketing, and route-to-market execution.

That transition became especially clear when he joined Unilever’s UK International Management Trainee programme in the late 1990s.

Unilever is one of those companies that has shaped modern consumer goods distribution across multiple markets globally. To go through that system is to learn how serious FMCG companies think about brands, categories, channels, retail relationships, consumer behaviour, and commercial execution.

Farayi eventually became National Sales Manager for Unilever South-East Africa, managing modern trade customers that represented a major share of the business’s revenue. That role gave him a front-row seat to the relationship between manufacturers and retailers.

It also taught him something that many people outside sales often underestimate: sales is not just persuasion. Sales is strategy. Sales is cash flow. Sales is distribution. Sales is forecasting. Sales is channel discipline. Sales is category thinking. Sales is execution.

In fact, sales is often where the promise of strategy either becomes revenue or collapses into theory.

Why Route-To-Market Execution Deserves More Respect

In Africa’s technology and entrepreneurship conversations, we often celebrate product innovation, fundraising, platforms, apps, and digital business models.

We do not talk enough about route-to-market.

Yet, in many African markets, route-to-market is the business.

You can have the best product, the most beautiful app, the strongest brand positioning, and the best investor story. But if you cannot get your product into the right hands, at the right price, in the right format, at the right moment, through the right channel, your strategy will not survive contact with reality.

This is why Farayi’s career is so instructive.

After Unilever, he moved into hospitality with African Sun Hotel Group, then into retail with SPAR Zimbabwe, and then into the Middle East with SIT Distribution, where he led route-to-market strategies for major brands and pioneered mobile real-time reporting using PDA devices.

That last point is important.

Long before mobile sales force automation became a mainstream conversation in Africa, Farayi was already seeing the power of putting a handheld device into the hands of a field rep. That shift changed what was possible. Suddenly, the field was no longer invisible. Sales activity, market feedback, stock levels, competitor activity, pricing, and retailer engagement could become visible in near real time.

That is the bridge between traditional sales execution and digital transformation.

For me, this is one of the most important insights from the conversation. Digital transformation in African retail is not only about e-commerce websites, apps, and online payments. Sometimes it is about making the physical market legible. It is about digitising field intelligence. It is about helping businesses see what is happening in places where formal data has historically been weak or absent.

That is incredibly powerful.

BTL Consulting And The Work Of Making Informal Markets Visible

Since 2010, Farayi has led BTL Consulting Ltd, a regional advisory and execution firm focused on helping FMCG companies make their products more available in Africa’s informal markets using mobile technology and modern sales strategy.

The significance of that work cannot be overstated.

Many multinationals understand formal retail. They understand supermarket chains, key accounts, procurement cycles, category reviews, and formal channel reporting. What they often struggle with is the informal layer, where the market is fragmented, fluid, human, and highly localised.

BTL Consulting operates in that gap.

It helps corporates understand how to sell into informal markets not as an afterthought, but as a serious strategic channel. This includes field teams, mobile-enabled reporting, retailer engagement, route planning, product availability, training, and localised execution.

Farayi’s work has also had a strong human capital dimension. Through BTL Consulting, thousands of young people and women have been trained and employed across East Africa. That matters because informal market execution is not only a commercial opportunity. It is also a jobs opportunity.

In a continent where youth employment remains one of our biggest structural challenges, sales and distribution can become powerful pathways into the formal economy.

This is another reason I think we need to change how we talk about sales careers in Africa.

Too often, sales is seen as something people do when they cannot get a “better” job. But that is completely wrong. Great salespeople understand markets better than almost anyone else. They know what customers want. They know what retailers complain about. They know which products are moving. They know which promotions are working. They know where supply chains are breaking. They know what the spreadsheet does not show.

A good sales professional is not just a seller. They are a market intelligence asset.

Copia, Farm Shop And The Hard Economics Of Serving The Mass Market

Our conversation also went into Farayi’s experience with Copia Global and Farm Shop, both of which offer important lessons for anyone trying to serve mass-market consumers and small-scale farmers in East Africa.

Copia was one of the most ambitious attempts to build a digitally enabled commerce model for underserved rural and peri-urban consumers in Kenya. Farayi was involved early as a founding advisor and shareholder, and later returned to help establish the farming division across Kenya and Uganda.

The broader lesson from Copia is that serving the mass market in Africa is incredibly difficult. It is not enough to have technology. It is not enough to have capital. It is not enough to have a powerful mission. The economics have to work at the level of logistics, basket size, delivery density, working capital, customer acquisition, agent incentives, and repeat purchasing behaviour.

That is where many narratives about African innovation become too simplistic.

We sometimes talk about “the next billion consumers” as if they are a single addressable market waiting for a digital platform. But the reality is much more complex. The African mass market is not one market. It is many markets, shaped by income volatility, geography, infrastructure, culture, trust, mobility, payment behaviour, and daily cash flow.

Farm Shop brought another layer to this conversation.

Farayi invested in and led Farm Shop as an agrovet and aggregation franchise retail chain in Kenya. The model combined agricultural inputs, small-scale farmers, franchise retail stores, produce aggregation, and services such as soil testing, crop spraying, farmer training, logistics, and solar solutions.

What I found especially interesting was the circular logic of the model: selling inputs to farmers through the stores and buying produce back from them through the same network.

In theory, that kind of model makes a lot of sense. It creates trust, repeat engagement, supply consistency, and a more integrated relationship between the farmer and the market. But in practice, it also faces the hard realities of agricultural economics: seasonality, post-harvest losses, logistics, financing gaps, quality control, price volatility, and the challenge of making rural distribution commercially sustainable.

That honesty is important.

Not every good idea scales easily. Not every well-funded intervention works as designed. Not every technology-enabled model survives real-world operating costs. And yet, each attempt teaches us something essential about what it actually takes to build African commerce from the ground up.

The Role Of Mobile Technology, Data And AI

A major thread running through Farayi’s career is the use of mobile technology to improve market visibility.

This is where I think the conversation becomes especially relevant to the digital transformation space.

For many years, Africa’s informal markets have suffered from a data problem. Not because there is no activity, but because much of that activity is not captured in structured, real-time, decision-ready formats.

Mobile technology changes that.

A field rep with a smartphone can collect order data, retailer feedback, location data, stock availability, competitor pricing, promotional compliance, payment status, customer complaints, and product performance information. When aggregated properly, that information becomes market intelligence.

Once you have structured market intelligence, you can begin to make better decisions.

You can improve route planning. You can optimise stock levels. You can identify high-performing outlets. You can understand product gaps. You can personalise retailer engagement. You can forecast demand better. You can detect changes faster. You can build more responsive distribution systems.

This is where AI could become very interesting.

AI will not replace the need to understand informal markets. In fact, it may make that understanding even more important. The quality of AI-driven insights will depend on the quality of the data being captured from the field. Bad data will lead to bad decisions. But good field data, combined with local context and strong commercial judgment, could help brands serve informal markets with far greater precision.

That is the opportunity.

Not AI as a shiny layer on top of broken systems, but AI as an intelligence layer built on top of real market activity.

Selling To Informal Markets

Farayi’s book, Selling to Informal Markets, is an important extension of this work.

What I appreciate about the book is that it does not treat informal markets as a romantic idea or a development-sector talking point. It treats them as serious commercial systems that require serious sales discipline.

The book is positioned as a practical blueprint for corporates, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and training institutions that want to understand how to succeed in Africa’s informal retail markets.

That matters because there is still a major gap between formal education and practical selling skills.

Many young professionals leave school with business theory but very little understanding of how products actually move, how retailers behave, how sales territories are managed, how time is allocated in the field, how customer conversations are structured, or how to build productive commercial relationships in informal environments.

Farayi’s book speaks directly to that gap.

You can buy Selling to Informal Markets on Amazon here

Why This Conversation Matters

What stayed with me after this podcast was a simple but powerful idea: Africa’s informal markets are not marginal. They are central.

They are central to FMCG. They are central to agriculture. They are central to employment. They are central to retail. They are central to financial inclusion. They are central to digital transformation. They are central to how millions of people actually buy and sell every day.

Yet, too many boardroom conversations still treat them as secondary.

That needs to change.

We need more respect for the people who understand route-to-market execution. We need more investment in sales capability. We need better technology for informal retail. We need stronger field intelligence. We need founders who understand that distribution is not a detail. We need investors who appreciate the complexity of mass-market execution. We need policymakers who recognise that informal markets are not simply a regulatory problem, but a critical part of economic life.

Above all, we need to listen to people like Farayi Ziswa.

Because they have spent years doing the work.

This episode of the Pure Digital Passion Podcast is one of those conversations that I believe every FMCG executive, founder, investor, sales professional, retail strategist, digital transformation leader, and policymaker operating in African markets should listen to.

It is about sales, but it is also about strategy.

It is about informal markets, but it is also about the future of African commerce.

It is about technology, but it is also about people, trust, discipline, and execution.

In many ways, it is a reminder that the next major frontier for African growth may not be found in trying to copy formal models from elsewhere, but in deeply understanding the markets that have been operating all around us all along.

Watch the podcast:

Listen to the podcast: 

You can also buy Farayi Ziswa’s book Selling to Informal Markets on Amazon here.