Kenya’s emerging social-commerce economy raises a pointed policy question for West Africa: will African economies build the regulatory, payments and trade infrastructure required to capture the value created by this new form of commerce, or will they simply host transactions taking place on platforms and systems designed elsewhere?
The Kenyan model matters because it differs substantially from the evolution of e-commerce in Europe, North America and China.
Western e-commerce was largely organised around centralised marketplaces and dedicated online stores: Amazon, eBay and later Shopify-based retailers. Kenya’s digital retail economy has developed much more organically around infrastructure that consumers already use every day — smartphones, mobile money, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and increasingly TikTok.
For many micro and small businesses, there is no conventional online shop.
The Instagram page is the catalogue.
WhatsApp is the customer-service desk.
A mobile-money account is the checkout.
A motorcycle rider or informal courier network provides the logistics.
And personal relationships, reviews, social-media followers and recommendations substitute for much of the trust infrastructure that large marketplaces traditionally provide.
That combination substantially lowers the cost of entering digital commerce. A seller does not necessarily need to build a website, integrate a payment gateway or negotiate with a major marketplace before reaching customers.
Research on Kenyan micro-enterprises has long documented the importance of social and messaging platforms in business activity, while more recent work shows social commerce becoming deeply embedded in purchasing behaviour. Kenya’s wider digital infrastructure reinforces the model: the Communications Authority reported more than 45 million mobile-money subscriptions and more than 42 million smartphones by early 2025.
The result is an ecosystem that looks less like a digital shopping mall and more like a network of millions of digitally connected market stalls.
That distinction has major implications for West African policymakers.
The marketplace may no longer be the marketplace
Traditional e-commerce regulation assumes that there is a platform sitting in the middle of a transaction.
That platform can register merchants, verify identities, collect taxes, enforce consumer-protection rules, process payments and retain transaction records.
Social commerce fragments those functions.
The platform where a product is discovered may be different from the application through which the order is negotiated. Payment may take place through a mobile-money provider. Delivery may be organised through an independent rider. The seller may never appear on a formal e-commerce marketplace at all.
A single transaction might therefore involve Meta, a telecom operator, a fintech provider, an informal merchant and a local logistics company — without any one institution possessing a complete picture of the transaction.
This is commercially efficient.
From a regulatory perspective, it is considerably more complicated.
Who is responsible when the product is counterfeit?
Which jurisdiction applies when seller and buyer are in different countries?
How is VAT collected?
How does a consumer obtain a refund?
How can a merchant establish a verified digital identity that works across borders?
And how can governments distinguish between a small individual trader and a commercial operation processing thousands of transactions without forcing the smallest businesses out of the formal economy?
Those questions become increasingly important as social commerce moves from neighbourhood retail into cross-border trade.
Kenya offers West Africa a preview
Kenya’s experience is therefore useful not because West Africa will necessarily reproduce it exactly, but because the structural conditions are increasingly similar.
Large populations of young mobile users already conduct significant portions of their economic lives through smartphones. Informal commerce remains a major source of employment. Mobile and fintech systems continue to expand. Social platforms provide businesses with an audience without requiring them to build standalone digital infrastructure.
This creates powerful incentives for commerce to digitise before it formalises.
That order matters.
Governments historically attempted to formalise businesses first: register the company, obtain a tax number, open a bank account and then participate in organised commerce.
Digital technology reverses the sequence.
A trader can now acquire customers, receive payments, advertise products and operate across cities before acquiring much of the traditional administrative infrastructure associated with a formal business.
Kenya illustrates both the economic potential and the regulatory difficulty of this model. Recent research has highlighted rapid uptake of social platforms among Kenyan consumers and MSMEs while also identifying recurring problems involving seller verification, counterfeit goods, consumer protection and tax compliance.
The lesson for West Africa is not that informal social commerce must be suppressed.
It is that attempts to regulate it using frameworks designed for conventional shops or large e-commerce marketplaces are unlikely to work particularly well.
ECOWAS already has a framework
West Africa is not beginning from zero.
ECOWAS adopted its E-Commerce Strategy and Implementation Plan 2023–2027 in July 2023. The strategy explicitly aims to promote domestic and cross-border e-commerce, improve trust in digital transactions and logistics, develop better statistics and market information, and create incentives for informal cross-border traders to formalise.
That last objective is especially important.
ECOWAS already recognises that informal trade cannot simply be regulated out of existence. The challenge is to make participation in the formal digital economy attractive enough that traders voluntarily migrate toward it.
In July 2025, ECOWAS moved further by launching a Regional E-Commerce Committee, bringing together member-state representatives to coordinate implementation of digital-trade reforms and accelerate cross-border e-commerce integration.
And in March 2026, West African ministers responsible for telecommunications, ICT and digitalisation met in Freetown to advance regional digital integration, demonstrating that the issue is increasingly being treated as an economic-integration question rather than simply an ICT policy.
The institutional architecture therefore exists.
The challenge is implementation.
Social commerce is developing on a commercial timetable measured in months. Regional regulatory harmonisation still tends to operate on a timetable measured in years.
That gap is where policy risk accumulates.
AfCFTA changes the scale of the problem
The African Continental Free Trade Area adds another layer.
The AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade, adopted in February 2024, is explicitly designed to establish common and harmonised rules for digital trade across African economies.
Its objectives include reducing barriers to intra-African digital trade, developing common standards, promoting interoperability and creating a predictable legal framework for businesses and consumers.
The architecture is unusually relevant to social commerce.
The Protocol provides for detailed annexes covering areas including digital identities, cross-border digital payments, cross-border data transfers, online safety, financial technology and the rules determining the origin of African digital products and platforms.
Those subjects may sound technical.
In practice, they determine whether a trader in Accra can sell efficiently to a customer in Abidjan, Lagos or Dakar.
Consider what a genuinely integrated African social-commerce transaction would require.
The merchant needs an identity that can be trusted across borders.
The customer needs a payment mechanism capable of moving money cheaply between countries.
Both sides need rules determining how personal and commercial data can travel across borders.
The buyer needs a consumer-protection framework.
The seller needs predictable rules concerning tax and customs obligations.
And logistics providers need customs processes appropriate for large numbers of relatively small parcels.
Without those layers, “continental digital trade” risks remaining much easier in theory than in practice.
Payments may be the decisive infrastructure
The most important element may ultimately be payments.
Social commerce expands rapidly when the act of discovering a product and paying for it becomes nearly frictionless.
Kenya benefited enormously from the widespread adoption of mobile money. Merchant-oriented services built on that infrastructure have allowed even very small businesses to accept digital payments without adopting conventional banking infrastructure. GSMA research continues to show how merchant mobile-money services can improve savings, financial management and business growth among Kenyan micro-entrepreneurs.
West Africa has strong mobile-money and fintech ecosystems of its own.
The difficulty begins when transactions cross borders.
A customer in Ghana and a merchant in Nigeria may each have access to sophisticated domestic payment systems while still encountering unnecessary friction when attempting to transact with each other.
Currencies differ.
Payment providers differ.
Settlement mechanisms differ.
Compliance obligations differ.
Fees accumulate.
An African digital single market therefore cannot be built simply by improving internet access.
It requires payment interoperability.
This is precisely why the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol’s work on cross-border digital payments is strategically important.
If policymakers get that layer right, informal digital sellers can gradually become continental merchants.
If they get it wrong, African consumers may remain digitally connected but commercially fragmented into national markets.
Ghana has more at stake than most
Ghana is particularly exposed to this opportunity.
Accra has spent years positioning itself as a regional digital and technology centre. The state-backed Accra Digital Centre explicitly describes its vision as positioning Ghana as a regional ICT hub, while current government policy goes considerably further.
In 2025, Ghanaian officials publicly framed the country’s ambition as becoming Africa’s Digital Trade Hub.
In 2026, the government launched a National AI Strategy, announced plans for major AI computing infrastructure and reiterated its ambition to make Ghana a leading technology hub on the continent.
That ambition cannot be achieved through data centres and AI laboratories alone.
A regional digital hub also requires the less glamorous plumbing of digital commerce: interoperable payments, digital identity, consumer protection, business registration, logistics, dispute resolution, data governance and tax systems capable of handling millions of small transactions.
In that sense, social commerce provides an unusually practical test of Ghana’s technology strategy.
It asks whether digital policy can improve the everyday commercial infrastructure used by a clothing seller on Instagram or a food producer taking orders through WhatsApp — not merely whether Ghana can attract large technology companies.
That distinction is crucial.
A successful digital economy cannot consist exclusively of technology firms.
It must make ordinary firms more digital.
Formalisation cannot mean simply taxation
Taxation will inevitably become part of this debate.
Social commerce can generate significant economic activity that is difficult for revenue authorities to observe. Transactions can take place through direct messages, payment accounts and informal delivery networks without producing the same paper trail associated with established retailers.
For governments under pressure to expand domestic revenue, the temptation to treat digitalisation primarily as a new mechanism for identifying taxable activity will be considerable.
That approach carries risks.
Kenya has already experienced debate over whether the taxation of regulated online marketplaces could unintentionally encourage merchants to migrate toward less visible social-commerce channels. Industry participants have warned that aggressive taxation of formal platforms can create precisely the wrong incentive: remaining informal becomes cheaper than joining a regulated marketplace.
West African policymakers should pay close attention.
The objective should be to create a graduated path to formalisation.
Very small merchants might receive simplified registration and tax treatment.
Growing businesses could progressively acquire additional reporting obligations.
Digital payment histories could help merchants demonstrate revenues when applying for credit.
Formal registration could unlock access to insurance, financing, government procurement and cross-border trading tools.
Formalisation then becomes an exchange.
The business accepts greater visibility and regulation.
The state provides something economically valuable in return.
If the exchange consists only of new taxes and paperwork, sellers have every incentive to remain invisible.
Consumer trust is the second missing layer
The other essential ingredient is trust.
Traditional informal markets rely on social trust: buyers know the merchant, know somebody who knows the merchant, or can physically inspect the goods before paying.
Social commerce extends that model into digital space.
A customer may buy because a friend recommended an Instagram page or because hundreds of people follow a seller on TikTok.
That works surprisingly well — until it does not.
Fake accounts, counterfeit goods, manipulated reviews, non-delivery and misleading advertising become considerably easier when sellers can create and abandon digital identities cheaply.
A regional social-commerce framework therefore needs something between two extremes.
Full marketplace-style regulation would impose excessive costs on micro-sellers.
Complete anonymity leaves consumers vulnerable.
Digital identity systems could provide part of the answer.
A verified merchant credential recognised across ECOWAS countries could allow consumers to establish that a seller is a real person or registered business without forcing every small merchant into an expensive corporate-compliance structure.
That is why the AfCFTA work on interoperable digital identities is potentially as important to commerce as the more visible debate around payments.
Trust itself is economic infrastructure.
Logistics remains stubbornly physical
The most digital transaction still ends with a physical product moving from one person to another.
That means regional digital integration eventually collides with roads, borders and customs.
A Ghanaian merchant can advertise to a Nigerian customer instantly.
Moving the package across the border remains more complicated.
Social commerce therefore changes the economics of logistics.
Instead of a few large importers moving containers of merchandise, digital trade can create enormous numbers of small shipments from individual merchants.
Customs systems designed around conventional commercial consignments can struggle with that model.
Administrative costs that are negligible on a $50,000 shipment become prohibitive on a $25 parcel.
For AfCFTA to become meaningful for micro-enterprises, simplified low-value shipment procedures will therefore matter enormously.
The digital marketplace and the physical border cannot be treated as separate policy domains.
Data will determine whether policymakers understand the market
There is also a fundamental measurement problem.
A substantial share of social-commerce activity is difficult to observe in conventional economic statistics.
A transaction negotiated privately through WhatsApp and paid via mobile money may look to regulators like an ordinary person-to-person payment.
The merchant may not describe themselves as an e-commerce business.
The social platform may have little information about whether a conversation resulted in a transaction.
The delivery company may know only that a parcel changed hands.
As a result, policymakers can be regulating a market whose real size and structure they do not adequately measure.
ECOWAS’s E-Commerce Strategy explicitly identifies improved e-commerce statistics and market intelligence as one of its four strategic objectives.
That may sound bureaucratic.
It is not.
Governments cannot design proportionate regulation if they do not know how businesses actually operate.
Bad measurement produces bad regulation.
Africa has a chance to write rules around its own market structure
There is a larger strategic argument here.
Much of global digital regulation was built around business models originating outside Africa.
Competition law responds to giant technology platforms.
E-commerce regulation assumes formal online retailers.
Digital-tax debates concentrate on multinational technology companies.
Data regulation often borrows heavily from European or American precedents.
Social commerce gives African policymakers an opportunity to design rules around commercial behaviour that is particularly important on the continent itself.
That could mean regulation built around mobile money rather than credit cards.
Digital merchant identity rather than traditional company registration.
Interoperable regional payment rails rather than international card networks.
Simplified cross-border logistics for micro-enterprises rather than systems optimised exclusively for large exporters.
And consumer-protection mechanisms capable of functioning inside messaging and social platforms.
This does not require rejecting global standards.
It requires adapting them to how African markets actually work.
The African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy already envisages a Digital Single Market by 2030, with digital trade, financial services and interoperability among the building blocks of continental integration.
The AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol supplies much of the legal architecture.
ECOWAS has a regional implementation strategy.
The missing element is speed.
The market is already moving
That is ultimately the policy challenge.
Social commerce is not a future technology waiting for ministries to regulate it.
People are already selling.
Payments are already moving.
Informal logistics networks are already delivering goods.
Small businesses are already using digital platforms to reach customers they could not reach through traditional retail.
The question is whether regional institutions can build infrastructure around that activity before fragmented national rules become entrenched.
The opportunity is considerable.
A merchant in Accra should eventually be able to advertise a product to a customer in Lagos, verify both identities, receive payment instantly, dispatch the package through a predictable customs process and resolve a dispute under rules understood on both sides of the border.
From the consumer’s perspective, the entire process should feel almost domestic.
That is what a functioning African digital single market would look like in practice.
But achieving it requires governments to stop thinking of digital trade primarily as websites and technology companies.
The emerging economy is messier.
It lives inside chats, social feeds, mobile-money wallets and informal businesses.
Kenya provides an early illustration of what happens when those pieces connect at scale.
For Ghana and ECOWAS, the challenge is not to copy Kenya.
It is to ensure that when the same commercial behaviour expands across West Africa, the surrounding infrastructure allows African merchants, payment companies, logistics firms and governments to capture more of the resulting value.
The regulatory race has therefore already begun.
The central question is no longer whether West African commerce will become more digital. It is whether West Africa can build the rules, payment systems and regional institutions quickly enough for that digitalisation to become integration rather than simply another layer of informality.
