Africa has built unicorns in fintech, mobility, and commerce, but where are the global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) giants?
I have wondered why African startups weren’t building SaaS products like their Indian counterparts. We have the engineering talent, cost advantages, and access to global ideas. But why don’t we see more Slack, Notion, or HubSpot equivalents emerging from Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra, priced competitively, yet built locally?
Over time, I realised the question isn’t about capability; it’s about focus. Most African startups are solving deeply local problems, and for good reason. Across the continent, the biggest opportunities often lie in infrastructure gaps: payments, logistics, mobility, energy, and healthcare.
Technology is seen as a development tool here, a bridge to inclusion and impact. So naturally, our brightest founders are drawn to the hardest local problems, the ones that keep economies from functioning smoothly.
But that focus comes with a trade-off. Local problems don’t always translate into global products. If your solution depends on mobile money integration or is built to solve irregular power supply or lack of credit, scaling beyond Africa becomes harder, unless you’re scaling to other emerging markets (e.g South East Asia, Latin America) with similar challenges.
The real question, then, isn’t whether we can build for the world; it’s whether we’re choosing to. Because building global SaaS products requires a mindset shift: moving from solving local pain points to solving universal problems, often abstract, software-first, and not tied to geography, infrastructure, or in-market operations.
That means thinking about team collaboration, productivity, platforms, workflow optimisation, or customer engagement in ways that resonate everywhere, not just within Africa’s constraints.
Why Africa can build global SaaS products
Africa’s biggest advantage isn’t cheap labor, it’s a creative constraint. Building products in environments where power cuts, bandwidth drops, and currencies fluctuate forces teams to design for reliability and resilience.
Those same design instincts are now global strengths. In Southeast Asia, Latin America, and even parts of Eastern Europe, users face similar realities: spotty internet, low-end devices, and unpredictable infrastructure. What works in Nairobi can often work in Manila or São Paulo.
Another quiet advantage is talent. Over 700,000 software developers work across the continent, many of them building for international clients or working with globally distributed teams. African engineers are learning to design, test, and ship software at global standards, often for customers who’ve never set foot on the continent. It’s the foundation of a new kind of confidence: building for the world, not just from it.
And then there’s the market complexity. Most African startups expand across multiple countries early, navigating new currencies, regulations, and consumer behaviors in each. Fintech companies like Flutterwave, Wave, and MFS Africa expanded across African markets very early and were forced to build multi-currency architecture, compliance workflows, and cross-border product structures as an early necessity and not a late expansion strategy.
That kind of forced adaptability gives African founders a multi-country mindset from the onset. In many ways, an African product manager juggling compliance in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya is already practicing what it takes to run a global SaaS operation.
Put together, these three ingredients, constraint, capability, and complexity, make Africa uniquely equipped to build software that travels. Products shaped by tough environments tend to be leaner, more reliable, and easier to scale. That’s an edge.
Should we replicate successful SaaS products?
There’s nothing wrong with starting by copying what works. Replication, done with purpose, can be a shortcut to learning.
The real test is whether you can adapt what you copy to the realities around you and turn imitation into innovation.
A cheaper Slack, built in Africa, might sound like a cost play: $4 per user instead of $9. But the real opportunity isn’t in undercutting prices; it’s in rethinking design. Imagine a collaboration tool that works seamlessly even when bandwidth drops, allows invitation via phone number (not just via email), compresses files automatically, integrates with WhatsApp for hybrid teams, and accepts mobile money payments. That’s not a clone, that’s context-led innovation.
This is what Cynoia, a Tunisian startup, is doing. It started as a team workspace built for Africa’s connectivity challenges, lighter file transfers, offline capabilities, and mobile-first workflows. The result? A product that doesn’t just serve African teams but also global NGOs, remote companies, and distributed teams in emerging markets. By solving for its hardest environment first, Cynoia built something resilient enough for everyone else.
We’ve seen this story before in other markets. Canva didn’t invent design software; Adobe did. But Canva understood that most people didn’t need enterprise-grade complexity. They needed a faster, simpler way to design online without high-end hardware or training. By reimagining design tools for accessibility, Canva turned a local frustration into a global category.
African startups can do the same. The goal isn’t to out-feature Silicon Valley, it’s to out-adapt it. When we build with Africa’s constraints in mind, limited data, low literacy, and high cost sensitivity, we’re not just solving for local users; we’re solving for the next billion global users who face the same realities.
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Olumide Durotoluwa is a Product Leader with experience building and scaling digital products across fintech, cleantech, and SaaS in African markets. Currently, he is a Senior Product Manager at M-KOPA, where he is instrumental in driving product strategy and growth.
