Africa’s delivery startups could draw lessons from India on using technology to overcome the lack of formal addresses in many cities…reports Africa Daily News Desk
Africa’s growing home delivery sector could take lessons from Indian startups on overcoming unreliable addressing systems, using technology, location intelligence and private-public cooperation to improve doorstep deliveries, according to a report.
Delivery companies in cities such as Nairobi and Lagos often struggle to reach customers because many neighbourhoods lack formal addresses and postal codes. The report argues that the absence of conventional addressing systems does not have to remain a permanent barrier to efficient delivery.
“Nairobi’s estates and Lagos’s informal settlements were never built with postal codes in mind, and they are not going to get them soon. That used to feel like a permanent handicap. But elsewhere, companies facing the identical problem simply built their way around it — using landmarks, delivery history, and machine learning to guess a location correctly with increasing accuracy, until ‘no fixed address’ stopped being an excuse for a failed delivery,” an article by Chukwudi Okeke, cited by India Narrative, said.
The report notes that Africa is not alone in facing the problem. India encountered similar challenges about a decade ago, with fragmented courier networks and addresses that often depended on landmarks and informal descriptions rather than reliable digital location data.
Indian startups gradually addressed the problem by treating logistics as a data and trust challenge rather than focusing primarily on physical infrastructure such as warehouses and delivery vehicles.
The report argues that this shift in approach could offer useful lessons for entrepreneurs and policymakers in Kenya and Nigeria as they seek to build more efficient delivery networks.
Rather than waiting for governments to create comprehensive addressing systems, logistics companies could develop their own location intelligence by collecting information from deliveries and using successful and failed attempts to improve their ability to identify precise customer locations.
Such systems could combine landmarks, previous delivery records and machine learning to build increasingly accurate location databases, allowing delivery workers to find customers even in areas without conventional street addresses.
The report also highlights the potential benefits of closer cooperation between governments and private companies.
“One structural choice is worth borrowing directly: treat government as an infrastructure provider, not a rival to private business. Elsewhere, instead of building its own delivery-tracking systems, the state opened up its existing data — vehicle registration, licensing, toll records, customs — through simple digital interfaces that private startups could plug into freely. The state did the unglamorous plumbing; entrepreneurs built the products people actually use,” the article said.
Under such an approach, governments could focus on providing digital infrastructure and making relevant public datasets accessible, while private companies develop consumer-facing services and logistics solutions.
The report suggests that opening selected government data through digital interfaces could help startups build services without requiring the state to develop every technological solution itself.
For Africa’s delivery sector, the approach could be particularly relevant as e-commerce and on-demand services expand in cities where conventional addressing remains limited.
The report also urges African startups to look beyond major capitals for future growth. It argues that in comparable emerging markets, some of the strongest expansion has come from second- and third-tier cities that have historically received less attention from technology and logistics companies.
For Kenya and Nigeria, this could mean developing delivery networks tailored not only to major urban centres but also to smaller cities and towns where demand for digital commerce is growing.
The experience of India, the report argues, demonstrates that weak addressing infrastructure does not necessarily have to prevent the development of efficient last-mile delivery networks.
By combining location intelligence, data, machine learning and cooperation with government, African startups could potentially overcome some of the logistical barriers that currently make doorstep delivery difficult.
