That’s how Emeka Ajene and his co-founder Greg Costamagna described traipsing around the motorbike parks of Lomé, Togo’s capital city, in 2018, t

Why every platform wants to be a super app

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2021-06-22 11:00:06

That’s how Emeka Ajene and his co-founder Greg Costamagna described traipsing around the motorbike parks of Lomé, Togo’s capital city, in 2018, trying to convince skeptical motorcycle drivers to join their new ride-hailing service. That ride-hailing service would be the first feature of an ambitious super app called Gozem, which would rapidly expand to offer food delivery, e-commerce, and financial services.

Picking Togo — population 8 million, gross national income per capita $1,670 (2019) — wouldn’t be your obvious choice in West Africa for a consumer-facing tech startup, much less a multipurpose super app. To the west, Ghana offers a larger, fast-growing and stable economy, while one country over to the east is Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and home to the continent’s most vibrant tech hub.

But Ajene, Costamagna, and Raphael Dana, Gozem’s third co-founder, focused on what they saw as the underserved digital markets of Francophone Africa, starting with Togo, moving next to Benin and then on to Gabon.

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