Africa Does Not Need to Own It to Use It
Every major platform company in the world stopped selling things and started selling access. Africa’s builders are only just realising this changes everything.
Somewhere in Lagos, a phone repairer is open for business. He does not own a generator. He cannot afford one, and even if he could, the fuel costs and maintenance would eat into margins that are already thin. What he does instead is rent a battery, a small, portable unit he pays for by the day. It powers his tools, keeps his equipment running, and at the end of a day’s job he returns it. He paid for productive use. He did not pay for ownership. And because he did not, more money stayed in his pocket.
Netflix does not ask you to buy a movie they sell you access. Salesforce does not ask you to run a server. Amazon Web Services does not ask you to buy the hardware. And nobody, not even the people building AI right now, is asking you to train your own large language model. They are just charging you per query. (Which, if you think about it, is the most expensive electricity bill humanity has ever collectively agreed to pay without fully noticing.) The product is not the thing you hold. The product is the access.
I have been watching this pattern move across industries for years, and I have come to believe it is not just a business model innovation. In the African context, it is a development model, arguably the most promising one we have.
The question is not who owns the infrastructure. The question is who gets to use it.
For decades, international development programmes have tried to help people own productive assets. Solar systems. Agricultural equipment. Motorcycles. Machinery. The logic was straightforward: if you own the tool, you control your economic future. Ownership equals agency.
It is a compelling idea. It is also frequently wrong.
Ownership requires capital. It requires maintenance. It requires the financial resilience to absorb the cost when something breaks at the wrong time. For most low-income households and small businesses operating on thin margins in volatile environments, those requirements are not just inconvenient, they are prohibitive. The asset becomes a liability the moment it needs a repair the owner cannot afford.
What I have watched happen instead, across multiple sectors and multiple countries, is something more durable. People do not need to own the asset. They need reliable, affordable access to what the asset produces.
The shift that is already happening
Look at where this model already works at scale on the continent.
“Fintech did not ask the unbanked to open a bank account, visit a branch, or build a credit history before they could participate. It gave them access to financial infrastructure through a phone they already carried. Moniepoint, which crossed unicorn status in 2024 and now processes over $22 billion in monthly transactions in Nigeria, did not build a bank. It built a platform that gives small businesses access to everything a bank provides, payments, credit, cash flow tools, without asking them to become a bank customer first. OPay did the same thing for everyday consumers. Neither company sold financial products. They sold access to financial rails.”
Ride-hailing did not ask drivers to own a fleet or passengers to buy a car. It gave both of them access to mobility on demand. The platform owns nothing but the software and the relationship.
Cloud computing is doing the same thing to small businesses that it did to enterprises a decade ago. A Lagos-based logistics company does not need to buy and maintain servers. It needs access to computing power when it needs it, priced at what it can afford.
Mechanised farming platforms across East and West Africa are renting tractor hours to smallholders who could never afford to own a tractor. The farmer pays for the output, not the machine.
In every one of these cases, the innovation is not the technology. The innovation is the commercial model that separates use from ownership.
What connects all of them is the same underlying logic: remove the barrier of ownership, and the barrier to productive participation drops significantly. You do not need to accumulate capital to access the tool. You need to generate enough income from using the tool to pay for the access. That is a fundamentally different ask.
Why this matters more in Africa than anywhere else
In more mature economies, the shift from ownership to access is largely a convenience story. It is about flexibility, efficiency, and not wanting to manage assets. In the African context, it is something more fundamental. It is about whether people can participate in the productive economy at all.
The barriers to asset ownership in most African markets are not just financial. They are infrastructural. They are informational. They are the absence of the credit systems, insurance markets, and maintenance networks that make ownership viable in the first place. When those systems do not exist, ownership is not just expensive, it is fragile.
Access-based models sidestep these barriers entirely. When the asset is owned and maintained by the provider, the risk of breakdown, obsolescence, and maintenance cost sits with the organisation best positioned to manage it, not with the individual least positioned to absorb it.
This also changes the incentive structure in ways that matter. A provider who owns the asset and sells access to it has a direct financial interest in keeping that asset working. A development programme that gives someone an asset and moves on to the next intervention has no such incentive. The model aligns interests in a way that grants and subsidies historically have not.
But here is something I did not expect to learn, and I think it is the more important insight: many people do not just use access because they cannot afford to own. They actively prefer it.
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We have seen this with delivery riders on electric vehicles. We deliberately start them on a rental model, in part because we want to understand rider behaviour before committing to long-term contracts. But what surprised us is how many riders want to stay on rental even when ownership becomes an option. Not because they cannot afford the transition. Because their income is not linear. They do deliveries seasonally. They have weeks where volume is high and weeks where it drops. A fixed ownership cost, a loan repayment, a lease commitment, does not move with that reality. A rental does. They pay more when they earn more and less when they earn less. Ownership locks you in. Access moves with you.
The informal sector is not just capital-constrained. It is income-variable. And most financing models, including most development interventions, are designed for income that is regular and predictable. Access-based models are not. That is not a small distinction. It is the whole thing.
Technology does not need to be sophisticated to make this work
There is a version of this argument that waits for Africa to have the infrastructure before it adopts the model. It says: yes, access-based models are the future, but we need better connectivity, more sophisticated payment rails, more reliable logistics before it can work here at scale.
I do not accept that framing.
The most powerful examples of access-based models in Africa did not wait for sophisticated technology. They worked with what existed. M-Pesa ran on SMS. The earliest solar-as-a-service models used basic prepaid systems and simple hardware. Shared mobility platforms launched in cities with inconsistent road infrastructure and unreliable data networks.
You do not build the platform for the Africa that exists in 10 years. You build the platform for the Africa that exists today, and you let the model pull the infrastructure forward.
What access-based models actually require is not sophisticated technology. They require three things: a platform to manage the relationship between the provider and the user, a payment mechanism that works at the user’s scale, and an asset that generates enough productive value for the user to justify the access fee. In many African markets, all three of these things now exist or are close enough to work with.
As digital payments deepen, as connected devices become cheaper, as AI begins to reduce the cost of platform operations, the access model becomes easier to build and easier to scale. But the model does not depend on those developments. It works now. The question is whether builders and investors recognise it.
What would change my mind
I hold this view with confidence, but not with certainty. The key assumption underneath it is that access produces outcomes that are comparable to - or better than - ownership for people at the economic margins.
I would reconsider if longitudinal evidence consistently showed that ownership generates substantially better long-term economic mobility than access. If rigorous studies demonstrated that people who own productive assets accumulate more wealth, invest more, and build greater resilience over a decade than those who access similar assets through shared infrastructure, I would need to revise my position.
I would also want stronger evidence on the durability of provider incentives. Access models depend on providers who remain financially sustainable, price services fairly, and maintain quality over time. If the evidence showed that these incentives break down at scale - leading to extractive pricing, degraded service, or provider collapse - then ownership, despite its barriers, may remain the more reliable development strategy.
I do not see this as a philosophical debate. I see it as an empirical question, and I think the evidence is moving in a clear direction. But I am watching it, and I am open to being wrong.
The implication for builders
If this shift is real, and I believe it is, then the most valuable thing a builder in Africa can do right now is not to create better products. It is to create better platforms for access.
Not another generator import business. A platform that gives a market trader in Kano reliable power by the hour without ever asking her to own anything.
Not another tractor manufacturer. A platform that lets a smallholder farmer in Kaduna book mechanised ploughing for three acres this season without a loan, a maintenance contract, or a shed to store it in.
Not another cold chain facility that requires a hospital or pharmacy to buy in. A platform that gives a community clinic in Accra access to refrigerated storage by the unit, billed monthly, maintained by someone else.
Not another last-mile logistics company trying to own a fleet. A platform that turns the hundreds of thousands of informal delivery riders already on the road into a network, and charges for the coordination.
The asset is almost secondary. The relationship, the payment model, the maintenance infrastructure, the data layer that improves the service over time, that is where the value is built and where the moat is created.
The companies that will define Africa’s next economic chapter are not the ones that sell things. They are the ones that own the infrastructure and sell the use of it.
This is not a new idea. It is the idea that built the most valuable companies in the world over the past two decades. What is new is applying it deliberately and at scale to the sectors that matter most for African economic development - energy, agriculture, healthcare, logistics, and small business infrastructure.
The platform is the product. Access is the model. And the opportunity is larger than most people building in Africa have yet recognised.
Joshua War
I write about building in Africa, the economics of emerging markets, and what I am learning as a founder. If this resonated, I would be glad to have you follow along.
