The informal trade opportunity most FMCG brands are leaving untouched

The numbers are striking enough to deserve repetition. In Nigeria, informal trade accounts for an estimated 75 to 80 percent of total FMCG retail volume. In Kenya, estimates range from 65 to 75 percent. In Ghana, the informal sector dominates similarly. These are not niche channels. They are the primary route through which most African consumers buy most consumer goods.

And yet most brand activation strategies — trade exhibitions, modern trade listing campaigns, distributor incentive programmes focused on formal retail — are designed for the 20 to 40 percent of volume that flows through organised channels.

What informal trade looks like in practice

Informal trade in African FMCG covers a wide range of outlet types: neighbourhood provision stores and kiosks that serve community catchments of a few hundred households, open-market traders who sell from tables or stalls in organised markets, roadside vendors and mobile sellers in high-footfall locations, and patent medicine vendors in the health category.

These outlets share several characteristics that make them both valuable and difficult to reach through conventional brand activation. They are owner-operated, with the owner making daily stocking decisions based on what they know moves. Their procurement is cash-based and frequent — buying small quantities every day or two rather than large orders monthly. They have no formal business registration, digital footprint, or presence in distributor databases. And they serve consumers at the precise moment of purchase decision, with the owner's personal recommendation often directly influencing what a customer buys.

Why brands underinvest here

The reasons brands underinvest in informal trade activation are understandable. Formal channels are easier to measure — a supermarket listing produces scan data, a distributor delivery produces an invoice, a modern trade sales rep visit produces a call report. Informal trade produces almost none of this administrative trail unless you specifically build mechanisms to capture it.

The scale of the activation challenge also feels daunting. A national FMCG brand in Nigeria has a potential informal trade retailer base of several million outlets. The field sales infrastructure required to reach all of them regularly is beyond the budget of most brands.

The campaign approach

The practical solution is not to attempt comprehensive informal trade coverage but to run targeted activation campaigns in specific geographies and retailer types, building a verified retailer database with each campaign.

A campaign that recruits and activates 2,000 kiosks across two Lagos local government areas is a manageable scope. It delivers retailer identity data, owner contact details, GPS locations, and sell-through performance data that the manufacturer did not have before. The next campaign in the same geography starts with 2,000 verified contacts rather than from zero.

Over time, this builds an asset — a proprietary informal trade database — that is genuinely difficult for competitors to replicate. The first campaign is the hardest. The fifth campaign starts with an advantage that took five campaigns to build.