Pavel Slavkov – Scaling African Businesses: From Local Success to Continental Growth

Succeeding in a single African market can feel like the destination. A business performs well, holds onto customers, builds a team that delivers, and by most conventional measures, it has arrived. What often goes unrecognised at that stage is that within a continent of this scale and diversity, arrival is frequently a pause rather than a conclusion.

It is a familiar moment for many business owners: growth projections that once climbed steadily begin to flatten, not because of weak execution, but because of geography. A single national market, however energetic, has a natural limit, and ambitious businesses tend to reach that limit faster than expected. “The businesses that hit this wall are usually the ones that did everything right in their first market,” says Pavel Slavkov, a CEO and entrepreneur with experience across African and European markets. “The wall isn’t a failure. It’s just the edge of the map they were working from.”

The obvious response, at least on paper, is the rest of the continent. Close to 1.4 billion people now sit within reach of a single trade framework, representing a combined economy exceeding $3.4 trillion, with some projections placing the continental economy at $7 trillion by 2035. That figure carries a kind of persuasive force on first encounter, as though the next stage of growth were simply a matter of stepping through an open door. Slavkov is careful to push back on that framing. “It is not an open door,” he says. “It’s forty-two doors, each with a different lock.”

What Expansion Actually Demands

Entering a neighbouring market rarely functions as a simple extension of what already exists. In practice, it tends to resemble starting again: a new legal entity is required, since the existing one holds no standing across the border. Established suppliers no longer apply, since many have never operated beyond their own home market either. A compliance regime often only becomes fully visible once a launch has already stalled beneath its weight, several months in, with capital already committed.

This is not an isolated pattern. Industry analysis has documented it directly: businesses across the continent have historically been built for markets that do not match the scale of the continent they occupy. Slavkov sees this as one of the more under-discussed realities of doing business on the continent. “Founders plan meticulously for their first market and then treat expansion as an afterthought,” he notes. “It should be the other way around.”

A Gradual Shift Beneath These Markets

What has changed, unevenly but measurably, is the infrastructure supporting cross-border operations. Customs processes once measured in weeks have begun to compress. Standards that once diverged by country are, in certain sectors, starting to align. Partnerships have also emerged with the specific mandate of helping early-stage businesses expand across borders through institutional backing rather than encouragement alone. This does not resolve the underlying fragmentation on its own, but it represents a meaningful starting point.

“A business built to survive one market is a different instrument entirely from one built to survive forty-two.” It is a distinction Slavkov returns to often when discussing expansion with founders.

That number, forty-two, is not a figure of speech. It is roughly how many currencies still operate across the continent, and the cost of converting between them is estimated at nearly $5 billion a year. That cost rarely appears in a business plan. It surfaces later, in the margin a deal loses at every stage where money crosses a border, first into a third currency, then into the one actually required. Pricing a product consistently across markets, or simply repatriating profit back to where it originated, both carry a tax that is easy to underestimate until a business is operating inside it.

A Different View of Capital

The picture around capital is shifting too. For years, the majority of funding behind African growth originated outside the continent. Even now, roughly 80 percent of venture financing still comes from foreign investors, though the trend is not static. Continental funding fell sharply from $6.5 billion in 2022 to a low point in the years that followed, before recovering to an estimated $4.1 billion in 2025.

What Slavkov finds most encouraging, though, is the growing role African institutions themselves are playing in financing that growth. Pension funds, central banks and sovereign wealth funds across the continent now collectively hold close to $1 trillion in assets, much of it still parked in low-risk, short-term instruments rather than the kind of long-term capital that scaling businesses actually need. “When the capital behind African scale is African, the narrative shifts from potential to ownership,” he says.

His advice to founders eyeing continental growth is to budget for the restructuring, anticipate the complexity it brings, and resist the assumption that success in one market signals readiness for the next. Scaling across this continent, in his view, was never going to be a matter of ambition alone. It requires governance, patience, and a continued willingness to rebuild parts of a business once considered complete.

That work, for the founders doing it seriously, rarely has a fixed end point.