I spent this past Wednesday afternoon at the Sarit Expo Centre moderating a panel discussion for the official launch of Farayi Ziswa’s new book, Selling to Informal Markets: A Corporate Blueprint to Successfully Selling to Africa’s Informal Retailers, staged in partnership with the Nairobi International Book Fair and the Kenya Publishers Association. 

I had already sat down with Farayi earlier this year on the Pure Digital Passion podcast, so I came into the room with some idea of what the gist of the conversation would look like. However, what I did not expect was how well he panel would unpack their deep and first-hand insights on Kenyamn and African retail in a less than an hour, and how impressive the audience Q&A that followed would turn out to be.

Farayi’s book opens with a line that should to be printed on the back of every corporate strategy presentation being written in any part of Africa today. “What looks like chaos is just an order you do not know yet.” Everything that followed, from Farayi himself, from our two other panellists, and from the audience, was an exploration of exactly what this concept means in practical terms. 

The Discussion Panel & Why It Mattered 

The panel was themed Unifying Africa’s Informal Markets: Sales, Technology and the Route to a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity, and it was based on the book’s central argument from three complementary vantage points. 

Alongside Farayi himself, I was joined by Fridah Sila, Head of Logistics for Kenya and Tanzania at Little App, the Craft Silicon-backed super-app operating across ride-hailing, deliveries, payments and merchant services in East Africa, and by Moses Matubia, currently in a Trade Impact role at East African Breweries PLC and, notably, one of the many East African sales professionals whom Farayi personally trained and mentored at BTL Consulting Ltd over the past decade and a half. 

The idea was to hear from the author, the salesperson at the frontlines of the trade, and the platform operator moving goods and payments through the informal economy every day, in that order, and then to open the floor. 

The Real Market Is Not What Many Think Is The Small Part Of The Market 

Farayi’s main argument, arrived at over twenty-seven years selling for and consulting to Unilever, SPAR, BAT, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Cadbury and others across Southern and Eastern Africa, is that Africa’s informal retail economy is not adjacent to the real economy. It is the real economy. His working model in his book estimates approximately 21 million informal retail outlets across the continent. In Tanzania, he told the room, roughly 90% of the economy is informal. In Kenya it is somewhere north of 60%. This means that the multinationals he has worked with have historically sourced 90% of their revenue from the small number of formal supermarket chains, and only around 10% from that vast informal market. 

The reason he wrote the book, he said, is that when he managed to persuade those multinationals to invert that ratio, or at least move it signififcantly, their businesses transformed. As he stated on the panel: “Move your business from that 10%, move it even if you can move it to 40%. It changed. It transformed their organisations. Suddenly they were cash rich.” This is a really big idea in action. 

Liquidity, Intimacy, & Aggregation

When I paused Farayi mid-response to elaborate what he had just said, he gave us three perspectives that underpin this statement, as follows: 

1. The first is liquidity. In formal trade, a manufacturer selling into Naivas or Carrefour typically waits sixty to ninety days for payment. In informal trade, the settlement window is seven days at worst, and often it is cash the same day. For any Kenyan or African business with a working capital cost of borrowing of 15% or more, that is not a small operational difference. That is the difference between a business that has to raise debt to grow and a business that can self-fund its own expansion.
2. The second is intimacy. When you sell direct to a duka owner rather than to a category buyer at head office, the person you are speaking to is at once the buyer, the merchandiser, the cashier and the consumer’s daily advisor. As Farayi put it, “the person you’re selling to is the person who’s actually telling you what their product is doing and how it’s perceived.” There is no research panel that competes with that feedback loop.
3. The third, and to my mind the most important, is aggregation. The 21 million informal outlets across Africa are, when you look at any one of them, unremarkable. When you look at them as a network, they ARE the market. This is the single insight that most Kenyan and African corporate retail strategies seem to still refuse to acknowledge. 

Kenyans Do Not Do E-Commerce. They Do DM Commerce. Really. True Story. 

Somewhere in the middle of Fridah Sila’s opening answer, she said something that made me pause and offer a live observation of my own as it captured something I had been thinking about for a while and has come out in various digital marketing consumer insights I have come across in the last couple of years or so. 

Fridah, who is Head of Logistics for Kenya and Tanzania at Little App, the Craft Silicon-backed super-app, was making the point that the biggest mistake she sees businesses make in this space is trying to formalize the informal market. The example she shared is that when a consumer wants to buy something online, they do NOT go to e-commerce sites, they go straight to the DM. We message the seller on WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook. We ask the price. We haggle. We agree the M-PESA number. We arrange the delivery through a boda boda rider we personally trust. The transaction is digital, but the operating model is fundamentally informal.

That, in a nutshell, is the basic architecture of Kenya and African commerce in 2026. The chatbot cannot replace the WhatsApp DM, because the DM is not a lesser version of the chatbot. The DM is the finished product. This is why the globally sourced e-commerce playbooks keep hitting the wall in African markets like Kenya, and it is why the book Farayi has written matters.

The Last Mile Is The Promise

Fridah’s operational reality-check on the panel was one of the most interesting discussion points during the panel. Little’s own market research, she said, shows that 40% to 50% of Kenyans would prefer to order online for delivery to their home, provided the delivery actually works. The three things those customers care about are, in her exact words, “reliability, speed, and efficiency”. Not price.

That last point is the one that most brands still get wrong. “The biggest mistake that brands make,” she said, “is they always try to offer the cheapest service to informal markets, and that’s the biggest misconception that is out there. Informal markets, it’s not really about the price point.”

“The last mile is what defines the overall customer experience.” Farayi may have written the most insightful book on the topic, but if the copy the customer ordered online arrives three days late in the wrong condition, what the customer will remember is the delivery failure, not the argument in Chapter 4.

Technology Does Not Replace The Salesperson 

Moses Matubia, whom Farayi personally trained at BTL Consulting and is now in a Trade Impact role at East African Breweries, brought on-the-ground-level perspective that only someone who has actually worked in informal markets can bring to such a conversation. On the difference between selling to Naivas and selling to a Mama Bboga: “when you talk of Carrefour, we talk of Naivas, we are talking of appointments, meetings where you’re discussing planograms. But when you go to these Mama Mbogas and these kiosks, this person sometimes is even multitasking. There is no appointment, so sometimes you have to wait.”

Matubia was also keen on the limits of the technology story that dominates every panel like the one we had. Asked what sales force automation cannot do, he said: “These are human things. Technology will never beat that. The trust and the building rapport with the customer, now that is up to the salesperson.”

He then told a story about how sales reps used to game their route data before proper GPS tracking, hitting one wholesaler and then geo-splitting the sale across nearby outlets to inflate their visit counts. What caught them out, he said, was watching how they actually greeted the shopkeeper on a route visit. “If you’ve been going somewhere for the last maybe 10 times, why do you need to introduce yourself?” That is not a lesson technology teaches. That is a lesson only a field coach who has actually sold the market himself can teach.

Who Will Build The Unified Marketplace & Who Will Not.

The book’s most ambitious argument is that these 21 million informal outlets can and should be unified into a single intelligent commercial ecosystem, and that the technology to do it already exists. What is missing, Farayi argues, is the will and the capital to connect it.

When I pushed him on who should lead that effort, his answer was candid. Not government. Not charity. “I don’t think it’s a government issue. I think it’s someone with a profit mindset, like Little App or like Efisales, someone who says, “I want to build something and I want to make it profitable for myself, but when they apply it into the market, it’s profitable for the manufacturer, it’s profitable for the retailer, it’s profitable for the consumer.”

The addressability problem that keeps this from happening at scale is real, and Farayi called it out for what it really is. “One of the challenges we have in informal markets is we don’t have addresses,” he said. “Most times when we began, we used to ride by the tree next to the Anglican Church… by the rock next to it, that’s where this shop is.” Solving that is not glamorous work. It is where the actual money is.

From The Audience: Five Compelling Questions

Leonard Mudachi asked two connected questions. First, whether the government’s current formalisation push, and the visible shift in Nairobi from traditional informal settlements to more formal housing developments, is genuinely changing the nature of informal trade. Second, whether the era of the dedicated Unilever salesman is over, replaced by distributors carrying products from multiple manufacturers.

Farayi’s answer to the first question was the most historically grounded of the afternoon. Every market on earth started informal, he said. South Africa is now largely formal. Kenya is semi-formal, formal in urban areas but very informal in rural ones. Countries like DRC and Somalia are still 90% informal or more. 

According to Farayi, Governments try to formalize because they want tax revenue, but the natural progression from informal to formal is driven by rising living standards, and it takes 10 to 20 years to run its course. “The informal is fighting as fast as possible to not pay a cent.” When governments try to compress that timeline, what they usually get is not formalization but disruption.

His answer to the second question was more provocative, and its one every ambitious Kenyan founder should take a closer look ar. “We’re actually seeing less multinationals coming to Kenya than any other country,” he said, “because the level of development of the people themselves is rising, and those multinational employees are now becoming entrepreneurs.” Kenya, he argued, is moving away from the multinational operating model faster than any other similar African market, in favour of locally-built businesses run by local operators who understand the nuances the multinational model always struggles to do. 

Pancras Kihimah asked what may have been the single biggest question of the afternoon. As over 80% of Kenyan retail still informal, but nearly every transaction now flowing through M-PESA, the M-PESA statement is effectively a tax record with the Kenya Revenue Authority’s name on it. What does the digitization of payments mean for the future of the informal trader when the digital footprint is now inescapable?

Fridah’s answer leaned on the Data Protection Act and on the industry-body engagement that the e-commerce and manufacturing sectors are running with regulators. “Just because we’re creating this digital footprint, we’re not creating an entire database for them to tax.” It was a measured response, but I noticed it did not entirely lay the concern to rest, and the tension it points out is a real one that we will still be talking about in five years time. 

Hansa Mboni asked the philosophical question of the afternoon. Having previously worked for a company doing last-mile LPG cylinder delivery, he had discovered that once the head-office overheads were loaded onto the delivery cost, his company’s price was higher than the local rider’s price. His question, effectively: how much of the “local nuance” everyone is celebrating is actually informality itself, structurally under-priced because it does not carry corporate cost?

Fridah’s answer was honest, and I thought one of the best of the day. Little’s app-based LPG delivery is not the cheapest option, she conceded. Therefore, what the platform actually offers is a different value proposition: security through goods-in-transit cover if the cylinder is lost or damaged, and traceability from the moment of order to the moment of delivery. 

More crucially, Little is NOT trying to eliminate the neighbourhood rider from the equation. It is onboarding those same informal riders onto its platform, so a rider who was previously earning one or two deliveries a day is now getting orders from Carrefour, Naivas, Chandarana and other major retail brands routed through Little’s demand engine. The platform aggregates demand for the informal operator. It does not replace him. This is signifiantly different, and I think much more sustainable model for what a logistics-tech platform in Kenya should be doing.

Lilly Nyaki, a bookseller from Eldoret, asked Farayi a question that turned out to be challenging for him. If the book is aimed at all of Africa, and every African country has a stake in its argument, how should someone in her position actually distribute it across the continent?

Farayi’s answer was refreshingly honest. “That’s a conundrum I’m still working around as well.” He talked about the collaborations the book has already opened, the investors and business-sector participants in the room that afternoon, and pointed to the QR code at the back of the book that would allow serious collaborators to reach him. The book itself is subject to the same distribution problem it is written about. 

If a physical book, published by a well-connected author with a track record, still faces this challenge in 2026, it is a reminder of how broken cross-border trade infrastructure remains for African products, and how much value there is to unlock when someone finally fixes it.

Emmanuel from Jumia’s East Africa team closed the Q&A with what he described as a million-dollar question: what is the biggest operational myth that founders trying to bridge into informal retail keep tripping over, that guarantees the same failure result if they do not get it right?

Farayi’s answer amounted to three commandments for anyone building in this space. Localize, or become irrelevant. The less localised the operation, the less it works in an African market. Do not become top-heavy. The organisations shutting down right now, he said, are the ones whose head-office overheads forced them to pass costs onto consumers who were never going to pay that price. Systemize everything. Use the tools that exist. Measure everything. Track everything. Feed the data into the sales operation and the strategy, and do not manage the business on gut feel.

Ultimately, these three commandments are the operating instructions for the book itself. They are also, if you have watched enough Kenyan and African technology ventures fail in the last decade, the three lessons that seem to keep recurring. 

The Biggest Takeaway

The single most important thing Farayi’s book does is that it takes a segment of the economy that most African corporate strategy still describes with a combination of nostalgia, condescension and euphemism, and it treats it as what it actually is: a sophisticated, self-organising, cash-rich, feedback-dense, human-mediated commercial system that will absorb the future of digital commerce on its own terms and at its own pace, and reward the operators who show up on those terms.

Farayi’s own closing line in the book puts it more elegantly than I ever could. “Africa’s informal retail economy is a trillion-dollar opportunity disguised as disorganization.” I would frame this profound truth and hang somewhere near the exit of every corporate strategy offsite happening in Kenya and across Africa during the next twelve months: “The future is informal, and it is digital.”

If you build for Kenyan and African consumers, sell to Kenyan and African retailers, invest in Kenyan and African commerce, or write software that touches any of those, buy the book. My longer conversation with Farayi from earlier this year from the Pure Digita Passion podcast can be found here