What Africa’s home delivery apps can learn from India’s startups

New Delhi, Aug 16 (IANS) Africa’s home delivery apps which are currently facing a major problem of not being able to deliver because of a lack of a proper address in various cities, can learn from Indian startups which have solved this very problem to operate an efficient fast delivery system to the doorstep of the consumer, a report has said.

“Nairobi’s estates and Lagos’s informal settlements were never built with postal codes in mind, and they are not going to get them soon. That used to feel like a permanent handicap. But elsewhere, companies facing the identical problem simply built their way around it — using landmarks, delivery history, and machine learning to guess a location correctly with increasing accuracy, until “no fixed address” stopped being an excuse for a failed delivery,” the article by Chukwudi Okeke states cited by India Narrative.

This is not a uniquely African problem, and that matters, because it means it is a solvable one. India was living this same chaos a decade ago — fragmented couriers, addresses that existed as folklore rather than data, an entire economy of “the blue gate past the second speed bump.”

India’s startups were able to work their way out of this chaos by changing their mindset to treat logistics as a data and trust problem first, and a trucks-and-warehouses problem second. That mindset shift, more than any specific app, is what Kenyan and Nigerian entrepreneurs and policymakers should be studying, the article states.

The article points out that instead of waiting for the government to fix the address system, logistics startups should build their own location intelligence — learning from every failed and successful delivery and move ahead to solve the problem of reaching the exact location of the consumer.

“One structural choice is worth borrowing directly: treat government as an infrastructure provider, not a rival to private business. Elsewhere, instead of building its own delivery-tracking systems, the state opened up its existing data — vehicle registration, licensing, toll records, customs — through simple digital interfaces that private startups could plug into freely. The state did the unglamorous plumbing; entrepreneurs built the products people actually use,” the article observes.

The article also highlights that there there is a need for stratups in Africa to look beyond the national capitals as the biggest growth in comparable emerging markets hasn’t come from the biggest cities, but from the second- and third-tier towns that were long ignored.

–IANS

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