860 million unconnected Africans bane of e-commerce, Bayobab argues

When conversations about e-commerce growth happen in Nigeria, the discussion usually turns quickly to payments, logistics and trust. Connectivity rarely leads the agenda, which is precisely the problem that Abibat Kazeem, Senior Manager for Commercials at Bayobab Nigeria, came to the Lagos Business School E-commerce and Payments Forum to address.

She argues that none of the improvements being discussed across payments, fulfillment and consumer trust will compound into meaningful growth if the majority of potential customers cannot get online in the first place.

The backbone of e-commerce success is hinged on connectivity, and when I say connectivity, I am focusing majorly on internet connectivity,” she said. “What we are all trying to achieve is to ensure that we get people online.

Kazeem started with the infrastructure that is already in place. Africa has 77 submarine cables, and Nigeria accounts for seven of them, most of which are docked in Lagos, with one additional landing in the eastern Kwaiboe region.

The coastal concentration is itself part of the problem:

Submarine capacity that lands in one city does not automatically translate into connectivity for the interior regions where a significant portion of Nigeria’s 250 million people live and trade.

The numbers she cited made the scale of the gap concrete. Over 860 million people across Africa still do not have access to the internet. In Nigeria, mobile penetration has improved, but underserved areas remain poorly connected, and those areas contain a significant portion of the MSMEs and consumers that e-commerce platforms need to reach if they are going to grow beyond the urban markets they currently serve.

“What about the underserved areas that we are not able to connect? That is a major stumbling block,” she said.

Read also: Nigeria secures $100 million from European bank to wire 90,000km of fibre across the country

Bayobab’s Abibat Kazeem states 3 levers for closing the gap

Kazeem’s proposed remedies were organised around three levers. The first is infrastructure sharing, the idea that digital infrastructure providers with existing networks should open them up rather than requiring every new entrant to duplicate costly capital investment.

“If we are able to share infrastructure, instead of every other provider trying to build because it requires huge CapEx, you can leverage existing infrastructure to deliver into underserved areas,” she said. She also pointed to satellite connectivity and microwave connections as alternatives for regions where fibre and 5G are not viable in the short term.

The second lever is government engagement. She pointed to a 90,000-kilometre fibre project currently being developed with government involvement and noted that 11 states have already moved on right-of-way waivers to lower the cost of building fibre within their borders. Her argument was that this cannot remain a Lagos-led conversation.

“The government cannot do it in isolation. They have to work with digital infrastructure providers, and they have to ensure they start to give subsidies and incentivise digital infrastructure providers.” She called on all states to see fibre penetration as an economic opportunity and not merely an infrastructure project.

The third lever is digital literacy, a point that tends to get omitted from infrastructure discussions because it is harder to quantify. Kazeem’s argument was that connectivity without the knowledge to use it does not close the commercial gap.

She pointed to vendors outside Lagos and Kano already transacting on Instagram and Facebook, closing deals and arranging logistics through informal channels, as evidence that the demand for participation is there and that digital literacy investment would be rewarded commercially.

Kazeem extended her argument beyond pure connectivity into what she described as the interoperability of the major infrastructure layers that enable e-commerce: payments, logistics, cloud and technology platforms.

Her point was that getting people online is necessary but not sufficient if the platforms they land on are not designed to work together.

“If all players within this ecosystem come together to create a platform, be rest assured that you will get more people online because, of course, connectivity is amazing. You are able to get people to pay seamlessly, right, across across all the payment platforms.”

She cited the ability of Shein, Temu and AliExpress to operate in Nigeria as a direct consequence of payment players like Opay, Moniepoint creating the access rails that made it possible, and argued that the same collaborative logic needs to extend across the full ecosystem.

The argument Kazeem was making at the LBS forum was ultimately about sequencing. Payment reform, logistics optimisation and consumer trust all matter, but without the connective tissue of internet infrastructure reaching the people and businesses who are currently outside the system, those improvements will continue to circulate within the same addressable market rather than expanding it.