"My biggest competitor isn't another insurance company. It's Jesus Christ."
A friend shared this with me recently. It came from a man who sells life insurance here in Ghana. I laughed when I first heard it. Then I sat with it for a while and realised he wasn't joking at all.
The Insurance Man's Problem
Ghana is a deeply religious nation. Seven out of ten people you meet are likely to be Christian. If you already believe you're held in the protective arms of the Lord, a life insurance policy starts to feel unnecessary. For some people, it even feels like an admission of weak faith. So this man isn't competing on premiums. He isn't competing on claims turnaround time, or how good his app is. He's competing with a belief system that has been in place far longer than his company has. I keep coming back to that story, because it explains something I got wrong for a very long time.
I Used to Think the Idea Was Everything
I had a fairly naive view of product development. I believed the idea was the whole game. See the problem clearly, execute reasonably well, and the market would meet you with open arms. I've since learned, several times over, that a good idea is about ten per cent of the work. Possibly less. What took me longer to understand is that the remaining ninety per cent isn't just execution either. It's the harder question of whether the thing you've built can attach itself to how people already live.
The Thing That Keeps Puzzling Me
Here's something I've never quite been able to explain. Airbnb, Uber and Netflix walked onto this continent with almost no targeted marketing and found users waiting for them. Meanwhile, a local product with a genuinely good solution will grind for years just to get from one region to the next. I used to file this away as simple unfairness. I now think it's telling us something more specific. I'll come back to it.
You Don't Argue With a Belief. You Go Through It.
Let's stay with the insurance man for a moment, because his problem looks impossible and isn't. The instinct is to treat this as a persuasion problem. Build a campaign. Explain, gently, that faith and financial planning aren't in conflict. That approach tends to fail, and for a fairly obvious reason. You've walked into a theological argument you cannot win, against an institution people trust far more than they trust you. What has actually worked in that industry wasn't a campaign at all. It was a channel.
Sell through the church instead of against it. Partner with denominations and church welfare groups, many of which have been running informal mutual-aid schemes for their members for generations. The demand was always there. It simply had a different name. Frame the product around funeral costs, which every Ghanaian family understands as a real and immediate obligation, rather than around death, which is God's business. Let the pastor's endorsement carry the trust your brand hasn't earned yet.
Notice what changed there. Not the messaging. The distribution, the framing, and in some cases the product itself. That distinction matters more than anything else I'll say here.
Sometimes People Have Already Solved the Problem Badly
There's a saying that when a problem defeats you enough times, you stop treating it as a problem. You build a workaround, you absorb the cost, and it quietly becomes part of how life works. Founders run into this constantly and rarely see it coming. You spot a real inefficiency. You build something that removes it. Then you discover people are far less excited than you expected. It isn't that your solution doesn't work. It's that they made peace with the problem long ago.
The workaround is free. It's familiar. It doesn't ask them to trust anyone new. And its costs are spread thin and invisible, while the cost of switching to you is concrete and lands today. So you're not competing with a rival product. You're competing with good enough and already paid for. That's a much harder opponent, and it's the default state of most problems worth solving in most African cities.
Mobile Money and the Question of Recourse
Mobile money is the great counterexample here, and I think it's usually explained badly. MoMo is the most successful technology adoption story on this continent. Something in the order of six in ten Ghanaian adults use it actively, and there are more registered wallets in this country than there are citizens. This is in a market where cards never really took hold at all. It didn't win by being technically impressive. It won by attaching itself to behaviour people already had. The agent is a human being you can look in the eye, sitting in a market you already visit, doing something close to what the airtime seller was already doing. The trust was carried by a person, not by an interface. Which is exactly why fraud hurts it so much.
MoMo fraud isn't a technology failure. It's social engineering. Someone calls, invents a plausible reason, and asks for a PIN. It attacks the human trust layer that made the whole thing work in the first place. Now, here's the part I think we get wrong. The reason this does more damage here than the equivalent scam does in London or New York isn't that our users are more gullible. Authorised push payment fraud costs UK banks hundreds of millions a year, and phishing still lands inside the most sophisticated companies in the world. The difference isn't sophistication. It's recourse. In a market with recourse, being defrauded is expensive and infuriating, but survivable. There's a chargeback. There's a regulator. There's a bank that absorbs the loss. Where there is no recourse, one bad experience doesn't cost you a transaction. It costs you the entire category. People don't become more careful. They leave, and they tell everyone else to leave too.
That asymmetry is a design constraint, not a marketing one. In a high-recourse market, you can hand some of the vigilance to the user and clean up the failures afterwards. Here you have to build so the user can't be talked into the mistake in the first place. Then you spend continuously on trust, which is a line item that never appears on a Western product team's roadmap.
So Why Do the Global Brands Walk In So Easily?
Back to the question I left open. The honest answer is that Airbnb, Uber and Netflix aren't culture-proof. They just don't meet the culture where we assume they do. They arrive selling to a thin, urban, already globally-referenced segment. People whose reference group isn't their neighbourhood but the internet. For that group, adoption isn't only about utility; it's about identity, and aspiration does the marketing for free in a way no local brand can buy. They also have the balance sheet to sit through five years of slow adoption. A local founder has to be right almost immediately.
And where these brands did hit the cultural wall, they moved. Think about Airbnb. When it first arrived here in Africa around 2015 and 2016, the reaction was almost universal. A stranger, sleeping in my house? It read as a security risk from every angle. It cut against how households and communities in this part of the world actually function. That objection was never really overcome. Look at what Airbnb is in Accra or Lagos today. It's overwhelmingly whole-apartment short lets. Not a spare room in a family home.
The market didn't learn to accept the original product. It quietly adopted only the part of it that made cultural sense, and the company let it happen. The culture didn't move. The product did.
Borders Are Real, Even When They Look the Same
One more thing worth saying, because I saw it up close recently. I travelled to Abidjan in December, my first visit to a neighbouring West African country. On the road in, the landscape and vegetation looked so much like Ghana that I assumed the rest would be familiar too. Then I opened Uber. No trips available. I opened Bolt. Same thing. Neither operates there. I fell back on traditional taxis and my Translate app. Payments told a similar story. My Visa cards were close to useless. But almost every shop owner, restaurant and taxi driver had a QR code on display for Wave or Orange Money. Not MoMo. Not the brands I know at home.
Two neighbouring countries. Similar landscape, similar climate, a shared border. Completely different products winning. Africa isn't a market. It's 54 sovereign countries with different languages, currencies, regulators and beliefs. A product that works in Accra can quietly die in Abidjan for reasons that have very little to do with the product itself.
What I'm Taking From All of This
The success of a digital product in this region is more nuanced than it looks from the outside. And the nuance isn't that we need better advertising. Culture doesn't so much block adoption as select which version of your product survives. Existing workarounds set the price of your value proposition. The absence of recourse decides how much trust you have to build into the structure of the thing rather than the copy around it.
None of those is marketing problems. They're product, distribution and channel problems, and they need answering long before a campaign runs. The moat was never the idea. I'm not even sure it's the technology. It's whether the thing you've built can settle into behaviour people already have.
Build into the ritual, not against it. I'm still working this out, and I'd genuinely like to know how it looks elsewhere on the continent. If you've watched a product take root in one market and fail in the next, I'd love to hear about it.