$500 billion.
That is the number MasterCard Foundation has projected the ecommerce sector in Africa could generate in a year by 2030. Largely, that will be roughly 20% of the projected size of Africa’s economy of by then. Except the hard number, there is nothing revealing there: the world of commerce will move online because the web remains the only infrastructure that reduces the marginal cost of doing many things at exponential level compared with whatever currently exists.
Yes, African commerce and trade will move online, because that is the final destination. In short, in a perfect internet economy, marginal cost becomes absolute zero which means transaction cost and distribution cost go. There is no economic infrastructure sphere that can compete with that, and that is why the web is the future.
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Yet, it has been bumpy, in Africa, as the march to ecommerce has made many poorer than richer, from Kalahari to old Konga. But inflection point is on the way, as logistics, immersive mobile connectivity, and citizen re-orientation converge.
2022 will be the magic year in Africa for that Eldorado moment to kick-in, on ecommerce, because most of the challenges would have been curtailed.
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