ABA Editorial · Sep 12, 2025 · 14 min read
African last-mile delivery faces specific structural challenges including informal addresses, urban congestion, and the cash-on-delivery payment model that dominates many markets. Jumia remains the largest pan-African e-commerce operator, with a last-mile network that has evolved through multiple operational phases. This report maps the last-mile landscape and the operators who serve it.
Last-mile delivery is the final physical step in the journey from seller to customer, and it is often the most expensive and least efficient component of African e-commerce logistics. The challenges are specific to African urban and peri-urban contexts: informal address systems that make location identification difficult, traffic congestion that reduces vehicle utilization, cash-on-delivery payment models that require in-person handling and create repayment risk, and customer density patterns that vary significantly between central business districts and sprawling residential areas. Every e-commerce operator and every logistics company serving e-commerce customers has had to develop specific operational responses to these challenges, and the quality of these responses largely determines whether e-commerce businesses can achieve sustainable unit economics. This report maps the last-mile delivery landscape, the major operators, and the structural challenges that define the category.
Jumia remains the most visible pan-African e-commerce operator, with operations across multiple countries including Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal, Tunisia, and others. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 and has since been one of the most publicly scrutinized African commerce operators, with its financial results and operational updates providing visibility into the broader category that most other operators do not offer. Jumia's logistics operations include a combination of direct fleet management, partnerships with third-party logistics providers, and a network of pickup points and dispatch riders that handle the final delivery to customers.
Jumia has iterated on its logistics model repeatedly over its operational history, with periodic shifts between direct operation and outsourced models as the company pursued different cost and service outcomes. The pattern reflects the broader difficulty of finding a stable operational model for last-mile e-commerce logistics in African conditions, and Jumia's publicly disclosed iterations have been informative for the broader sector even when individual decisions proved imperfect.
Most African last-mile delivery in urban areas depends on motorcycle dispatch riders operating either through formal employment with delivery companies or through gig economy platforms that match riders with customers on demand. The motorcycle form factor is well-suited to African urban conditions: motorcycles can navigate through traffic that blocks larger vehicles, they can reach addresses that conventional delivery trucks cannot access, and they have operating cost structures that allow affordable delivery pricing for low-value parcels. The rider economy includes hundreds of thousands of individual riders across the continent, with major operations in Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Cairo, Accra, and essentially every major African city.
The gig economy model for dispatch riders has attracted labor rights attention in multiple African countries, with concerns about rider income levels, working conditions, safety, and the absence of formal employment protections. Some operators have adjusted their models in response to these concerns; others have maintained more purely transactional arrangements. The regulatory trajectory of gig economy classification in African jurisdictions is an open question that will affect the cost base for all last-mile delivery operators.
African cities often lack the standardized street addresses and postal codes that e-commerce delivery in other regions takes for granted. Informal settlements may not have named streets at all. Middle-class and high-end neighborhoods may use descriptive addresses that require local knowledge to navigate ("the third house after the mosque, blue gate, near the bakery"). Commercial addresses often rely on landmark-based navigation rather than numerical street addresses. GPS-based location sharing through smartphone apps has partially addressed this problem, but the underlying address infrastructure remains weak across most African cities.
The practical implication is that last-mile delivery depends heavily on customer participation in the delivery process (sharing GPS coordinates, providing phone contact for rider coordination, being physically available at the delivery location at the right time). This makes African last-mile delivery more operationally complex than delivery in contexts where addresses can be trusted to identify locations reliably, and it introduces failure modes (customer not available, GPS location incorrect, phone not answered) that generate significant redelivery costs.
A substantial share of African e-commerce transactions still settle on cash-on-delivery (COD) terms, where the customer pays the delivery rider in cash when the goods are handed over. This model exists because many African consumers lack the digital payment infrastructure for prepaid online commerce, or prefer the security of paying only upon receipt of goods they can inspect, or do not trust online merchants enough to prepay. The COD model has specific operational consequences: delivery riders must handle cash collection, count change, and reconcile their collections at the end of each shift; disputes about goods quality or order accuracy are resolved at the point of delivery rather than through asynchronous customer service; and rejected deliveries (where the customer refuses to accept the goods or pay) generate return logistics costs that prepaid models do not face.
Over time, the share of e-commerce transactions settling through digital payment has been growing in most African markets as mobile money and card infrastructure has expanded. The shift is gradual and uneven across markets, with some countries (Kenya, where M-Pesa dominates) transitioning faster than others (Nigeria, where the cash economy remains deeply entrenched).
Sendy, the Kenyan logistics operator that shut down in August 2023, had originally built its business around last-mile delivery and courier services before pivoting toward other logistics models in the period preceding its closure. The Sendy experience illustrates the difficulty of building sustainable last-mile delivery businesses in African conditions. Despite raising approximately USD 26.5 million from investors including Toyota Tsusho and others, the company was unable to find a commercially sustainable model and ultimately ceased operations with over 200 employees affected.
The lessons from Sendy apply broadly to the last-mile category. Unit economics are tight. Operational complexity is high. Customer experience issues (failed deliveries, disputes, damages) consume disproportionate management attention relative to the revenue they generate. And scaling beyond a single city introduces coordination challenges that can undermine the operational discipline that worked at smaller scale.
Three indicators will shape African last-mile delivery. First, whether Jumia or its peers demonstrate durable profitability in their logistics operations after years of iterating on operational models. Second, whether the gig economy regulatory framework in major African markets develops in ways that affect the cost base for dispatch rider operations. Third, whether digital payment adoption continues to reduce the share of e-commerce transactions settling on cash-on-delivery, simplifying the operational model for delivery operators. Last-mile delivery is one of the most difficult components of African logistics, and improvements in this category would unlock value across every other commercial activity that depends on physical goods movement to end customers.