Adeniyi Adebayo, Chief Business Officer at Yango Group, has a counterintuitive take on one of the biggest complaints about doing business in Africa. While most founders treat the continent's market fragmentation as a problem to solve, he sees something useful in it. "Fragmentation also leads to resilience in a lot of ways," he told TechCabal in October. "If you have super centralised systems, when they collapse, the entire thing collapses."
Yango Group is a Dubai-headquartered company offering digital services across mobility, delivery, foodtech, and entertainment in over 30 countries. That footprint means the company regularly bumps up against the full range of what African expansion actually looks like: different licensing requirements, tax regimes, data rules, payment systems, and consumer behaviours, sometimes shifting city by city within a single country.
Norebase's State of Expansion in Africa 2026 report, drawn from data on more than 40,000 companies, puts some shape to that complexity. It documents the differences in how long it takes to register a business across African markets, and the varying rules companies have to meet before they can operate.
Yango's answer to all of this is to build local adaptations on top of a shared technology base, while also working directly with governments where regulations can be shaped. Adebayo is clear that language localisation, the most common starting point for companies entering new markets, is only one piece of that work. "We think language is just one of the components," he said. "It's an important component for sure, but it's just one of the components for localising businesses and for demonstrating the diversity that exists on the continent."
What that broader localisation actually looks like in practice is the more interesting question.
Originally published by TechCabal.