Jumia opened a 5,500-square-metre warehouse at PK24 in April 2025, and it tells you something important: the company is not retreating from Côte d'Ivoire, it is digging in. While the platform has exited South Africa and Tanzania in recent years, Côte d'Ivoire sits firmly among its four largest markets globally, alongside Nigeria, Morocco, and Kenya. The country is not a side story in Jumia's strategy. It is a headline.
What makes that bet interesting is where the orders are actually coming from. In 2024, more than 67% of purchases on the platform originated outside of Abidjan's commercial centres. Bouaké and Yamoussoukro are leading those volumes, a signal that Ivorian e-commerce is being built from the interior outward, not the other way around.
Jumia's JForce network is a big part of how that reach works. The programme connects independent sales agents on the ground directly to consumers, and Côte d'Ivoire alone has more than 19,000 active JForce agents. In 2024, those agents carried out more than 120 marketing activations across the country. Fourteen years into building this market, Jumia is not coasting.
The fast-moving consumer goods sector is meeting this momentum with its own recovery. Distribution audit data from Maverick Research covering the first half of 2026 shows FMCG volumes growing around 3% and value rising 2% across food, home care, and hygiene and beauty categories. Food now accounts for 34.2% of total FMCG volume, driven by everyday staples like edible oils, tomato paste, dairy products, noodles, and condiments, bought in small quantities, frequently, through informal retail channels across the country.
For brands watching this space, the real question is how to use Jumia's infrastructure smartly in a market where the route to the Ivorian consumer still runs through the neighbourhood shop and, increasingly, the phone screen.
Originally published by TechCabal.