Digital economy: e-commerce and its structural bottlenecks

In West Africa, the story of e-commerce is often told in the future tense: that of a young, connected market ready to shift online. The figures tell a more nuanced story. UNCTAD's B2C E-commerce Index, which measures an economy's capacity to support online purchases, places Ghana at the top of the region with 51.9 out of 100, and Niger nearly last in the world with 5.6, one of the three lowest scores among 152 ranked economies. Between the two, a gap of almost 1 to 10. What is most lacking is not connectivity, but the chain that runs from the internet user to the paid delivery: three structural bottlenecks (logistics, trust, payment) keep the potential on a leash, and none of them eases through the growth of mobile internet alone.

One region, ten speeds: the intra-regional gap is the defining fact

The first observation is not the region's lag, but its heterogeneity. In 2020, UNCTAD's B2C index ranges from 51.9 for Ghana and 46.2 for Nigeria to just 5.6 for Niger. Senegal (44.1) is close behind the leaders, while Côte d'Ivoire (30.4), Togo (23.2) and Benin (20.7) occupy the bottom third of the global ranking, with Benin at the 134th position. This dispersion says something essential: there is no single West African e-commerce market, but national markets at radically different stages of maturity. The English-speaking coastal countries, backed by advanced banking penetration and massive mobile money, have built a lead that the Sahelian economies, where network access remains the first obstacle, do not close mechanically.

This gap deserves to be put in perspective. The best regional score, Ghana's, ranks the country only fifth in Sub-Saharan Africa, behind Mauritius, South Africa, Tunisia and Algeria. In other words, even the West African leader remains far from international standards: Switzerland, at the top of the global ranking, exceeds 90 points. The practical consequence is twofold. On the one hand, there is no single policy transposable to the whole region, so different are the starting points. On the other hand, the trajectory of the leaders shows that catching up is possible and fast, provided one acts simultaneously on the weak links rather than waiting for connectivity to pull everything up on its own. The geography of West African e-commerce is therefore not fixed: it reflects investment choices as much as levels of development.

A decade of progress, but a ceiling that holds

The 2020 snapshot masks a real movement. Between 2016 and 2020, Ghana rose from 30.5 to 51.9, gaining more than twenty points, while Senegal progressed from 33.4 to 44.1. The trajectory is never linear: scores oscillate from one year to the next with methodological revisions and the components measured. Benin illustrates the limits of the movement. Starting from 15.3 in 2016, it climbs to 20.1 in 2018, reaches 21.0 in 2019, then falls back to 20.7 in 2020. In other words, the country has indeed lifted off the floor, but it then hits a ceiling. Internet growth is no longer enough: what caps the score are the secure payment and logistics components, slower to move than the share of internet users.

What the index really measures: four links, only one mature

To act on the score, one must understand what it adds up. UNCTAD's B2C index rests on four equally weighted components: the share of the population using the internet, account ownership (bank or mobile money), the number of secure internet servers per million inhabitants, and the reliability of the postal service. Each component corresponds to a link in the purchasing chain: getting connected, paying, securing the transaction, receiving the parcel. Yet these links do not progress at the same pace. Mobile payment is by far the most mature, while secure servers and postal logistics remain the weak points. It is this asymmetry that explains why connectivity can leap without the score following.

• Getting connected. The share of internet users is rising everywhere, but remains very uneven: 70.7% in Ghana in 2023, 32.4% in Benin, 13.0% in Niger. In the Sahel, network access remains the very first bottleneck.
• Paying. Mobile money is the most accomplished lever, with account ownership reaching 73.9% of adults in Ghana and 61.8% in Senegal in 2024. It is the region's trump card.
• Securing. Secure internet servers, the foundation of safe transactions, remain rare: 49.1 per million inhabitants in Ghana, 8.2 in Benin, 1.3 in Niger. The trust infrastructure is lacking.
• Delivering. Postal reliability and addressing are the weak link, which caps scores even where payment and connectivity are progressing.

The first bottleneck is not the same everywhere: connectivity in the Sahel

Where e-commerce struggles most, the problem begins upstream of the purchase: there are not enough internet users to form a market. The regional contrast is striking. Ghana connects 70.7% of its population in 2023, Senegal 59.2%, while Niger caps at 13.0% and Burkina Faso at 25.4%. Benin, at 32.4%, has more than tripled its penetration since 2015 (11.3%), a real progress that nonetheless leaves two-thirds of the population offline. The lesson is clear: in Sahelian economies, no payment or logistics policy will bear fruit as long as the connectivity base does not reach a critical mass. Elsewhere, on the coast, connectivity is no longer the main lock, and the effort must shift toward the next links.

These series call, moreover, for cautious reading. Ghana's share of internet users rises from 22.1% in 2019 to 68.6% in 2021, a jump that reflects a change of method (household surveys versus ITU estimates) as much as a real evolution. Côte d'Ivoire, for its part, declines after 2017. These jolts do not invalidate the data, but they require reasoning in terms of trend and being wary of crude year-on-year comparisons. It is precisely this kind of methodological vigilance that distinguishes a serious reading from one that takes the chart at face value.

The region's trump card: mobile payment

If one link gives West Africa a real advantage, it is payment. The region belongs to the continent where mobile money is the most widespread in the world: in Sub-Saharan Africa, the share of adults holding a mobile money account rose from 21% in 2017 to 33% in 2021. In 2024, mobile money account ownership reaches 73.9% of adults in Ghana, 61.8% in Senegal, 47.5% in Côte d'Ivoire and 44.3% in Benin. This payment infrastructure, born for person-to-person transfers, is the natural rail for local online commerce. It explains why the regional leaders in e-commerce are also the mobile money champions: digital payment is already an everyday gesture there, not a novelty to be tamed.

Mobile payment is the rail that West Africa has already laid. What is missing is the train: the last-mile logistics and the trust infrastructure that turn an account into an actual purchase.

The link that breaks the chain: logistics and trust

An internet user who owns a mobile money account can still give up buying online if the parcel does not arrive, or if they fear paying before receiving. This is where the chain breaks. Two locks combine. The first is material: without reliable addressing or a dense logistics network, last-mile delivery is expensive, takes time and often fails. In cities where streets do not always have names or houses numbers, every delivery involves a phone call, a route negotiation and sometimes several attempts, all costs that make small-basket sales structurally loss-making. The second lock is intangible: trust. Secure internet servers, which guarantee encrypted transactions, remain rare (8.2 per million inhabitants in Benin, 1.3 in Niger, against 49.1 in Ghana). For lack of trust infrastructure and reliable delivery, cash on delivery imposes itself as the default solution. Yet this payment method inflates costs, multiplies returns and sustains distrust, exactly the opposite of what the sector needs to develop.

Recent research confirms the weight of this factor: ease of payment is the primary determinant of the e-customer's trust, ahead even of perceived security. In other words, trust cannot be decreed, it takes hold when paying becomes simple, safe and reversible. As long as the buyer must produce cash at the moment of delivery because they trust neither the merchant nor the network, e-commerce remains a half-offline commerce, deprived of the cost and scale gains that make its value.

The cost of inaction: value captured elsewhere

Inaction has a price, and it is not limited to missed sales. For lack of last-mile logistics and reliable addressing, cash on delivery dominates, which weighs down costs, inflates returns and sustains distrust in a circle that closes in on itself. Without joint reforms on logistics, payment and trust, UNCTAD estimates that the potential of online commerce remains held back. The risk is not only to grow slowly: it is to let the value created be captured by foreign platforms, better capitalized, which operate the trust and payment layer that local ecosystems have not built. E-commerce then becomes a channel of digital imports rather than an engine of local businesses. The market orders of magnitude sometimes put forward (around 15 billion dollars for Nigeria, nearly 0.9 billion for Ghana) come from highly variable private estimates and must be handled with caution, but they suggest the scale of the value at stake.

What averages hide: the divide behind the rate

A flattering national account-ownership rate masks deep divides. Benin shows 51.8% of adults holding a financial or mobile money account in 2024, a spectacular progress compared with 2011. But the other side of the figure is that nearly one adult in two (48%) remains without any account, and is therefore structurally excluded from online commerce paid digitally. And holding an account does not mean using it to buy: the actual use of merchant digital payment is far below mere ownership. Many holders continue to settle their bills in cash. Behind the average also hide the gap between women and men, between cities and countryside, and between those who receive transfers and those who actually pay online merchants.

The progress nonetheless remains massive and deserves to be underlined. Total account ownership among adults, financial accounts and mobile money combined, has jumped everywhere in a decade: Senegal rose from 5.8% in 2011 to 76.5% in 2024, Benin from 10.5% to 51.8%, Ghana from 29.4% to 81.2%. It is one of the fastest catch-ups in the world. The challenge is no longer to open accounts, but to make them come alive: converting ownership into regular merchant use is crossing the step that separates financial inclusion from real e-commerce.

The CRAD angle: measure the chain, not just the connection

CRAD reads these figures as a call to measure the complete chain, from connectivity to actual payment and delivery, rather than the share of internet users alone. Aggregate indices like the B2C index are valuable for comparing countries, but they do not say where the chain breaks within a country, nor why a potential buyer gives up. Yet this is where the effectiveness of a digital policy is decided. The same public effort will produce very different results depending on whether it targets connectivity in Niger, trust in Benin or logistics in Côte d'Ivoire. Without a local and disaggregated diagnosis, investment advances blindly.

Our added value is to produce field surveys on the real bottlenecks (trust, addressing, logistics cost, gender gap) and to translate them into decision-making dashboards for states and donors. Measuring merchant use rather than mere account ownership, geolocating the areas where delivery fails, disaggregating by sex and by setting: this is how a national score is turned into an investment roadmap. Digital data collection and long-term monitoring and evaluation are, here as elsewhere, the condition for reforms to genuinely move the B2C index, and not merely to comment on it.

This approach applies particularly to the gender dimension, often invisible in aggregate statistics. The gap between women and men in access to the phone, the account and online purchasing weighs heavily on a market's potential, but it is only corrected if it is measured. In the same way, the divide between cities and countryside conditions the geography of logistics: concentrating pickup points where density justifies it, then gradually extending, costs far less than aiming for uniform and theoretical coverage. Each of these trade-offs rests on data that international indices do not provide, and that only a field survey, repeated year after year, can establish with the precision required for public decision-making. West African e-commerce does not lack promises; it lacks a compass that tells, country by country and area by area, which link to repair first.

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