Businesses don't fail in Africa because founders get lazy.
They fail because most business models are built in climates where power stays on.
$776M flooded into African agritech in 2022, an all-time high that felt airtight for a moment, because digitization, platform economics, and asset-light narratives are comforting when you’ve never had to price diesel volatility into your model or send technicians down roads that disappear for an entire day.
Then reality showed up.
Drive from Enugu to Benue, and you'll pass mountains of rotting fruit that never made it to market.
Over 50% of food produced across Africa still rots post-harvest, not because demand is missing, but because cold storage infrastructure was financed by investors who never priced diesel volatility into unit economics or calculated what happens when your “scalable platform” depends on compressors running in 40-degree heat with no local parts supply and no reliable grid.
On slides, the math looked inevitable.
$12 per day in revenue per unit against $4 in operating costs.
In reality, once daily outages forced diesel backup, electricity costs tripled, maintenance became multi-day logistics exercises, theft and vandalism crept in, and compressor failures piled up; that same unit bled roughly $6 per day, which means every deployment quietly destroyed value while spreadsheets projected $8 in daily profit.
Here’s what the pitch decks buried.
Our analysis shows 67% of deployed cold chain units went offline within 18 months, because asset-light platform economics cannot survive asset-heavy infrastructure reality, especially in environments where power outages are not edge cases but default operating conditions.
This wasn’t an execution failure, and it wasn’t founder incompetence.
It was infrastructure economics deliberately mispriced as software scalability, where VCs funded digital aggregation plays that assumed cold chains would simply exist, only to discover that when the grid fails, so does the business model.
When your company dies the moment electricity disappears, you’re not building resilience; you’re renting optionality from infrastructure you don’t control.
This week’s DUG Weekly dissects the full mechanism, the hidden cost multipliers investors overlooked, and why “asset-light infrastructure” has become African tech’s most expensive contradiction.
If you invest, operate, or approve capital in emerging markets, this won’t feel theoretical.
It will feel familiar.
Subscribe for the full forensics.
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15 Janvier 2026 à 07h15
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