Ride-hailing was just the entry point. Yango had bigger plans.

In a side room at the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, on May 15, Yango Group Chief Business Officer Adeniyi Adebayo shared a brief history of the company’s expansion with an audience of business executives and investors.  “The name Yango was actually coined in Ghana after a local word that means ‘let’s go,’” he said. “When we showed up in 2018 to set up this business, the first thing we recognised is that we have to be a local brand. Today, that story has grown across 35 markets. I started with a group of six other people building this business. We built multiple products; generally, we have got over 70 different product lines.” Yango Group is a Dubai-headquartered technology company that operates the Yango ride-hailing platform, one of the fastest-growing mobility services in Africa, with operations spanning markets including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company says it has completed 340 million rides across Africa and has over 500,000 drivers on its platform across the continent. It also operates delivery, entertainment, and e-commerce services, and is pushing into mapping, logistics routing, and cloud infrastructure.  However, the ride-hailing label has stuck, even as the business says it has moved well beyond it. That tension, between what Yango is known as and what it is trying to become, was the subtext of everything Adebayo discussed in Kigali.  On May 18, three days after those conversations, Yango Group formally announced the launch of Yango Tech in Africa: a business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) technology arm that packages AI consulting, smart city infrastructure, healthcare digitisation, and financial services platforms for businesses and governments across the continent.  The city thesis To understand Yango Tech, you first have to understand how Yango Group thinks about markets. The company’s framework is not built around countries, but cities. “There is a fundamental belief, and this is actually very personal to me, that cities are the engines of growth on the continent,” Adebayo, who is also CEO Africa at Yango Group, told me during a wide-ranging interview on the sidelines of the forum.  The argument he makes is statistical. Cote d’Ivoire has a population of roughly 34 million, but its economic activities are overwhelmingly concentrated in Abidjan, its capital city of 6.3 million people. No other city in the country has more than one million residents. Abidjan remains Côte d’Ivoire’s dominant economic hub, with the city’s port accounting for around 60% of national gross domestic product (GDP), according to the World Bank. “If Abidjan is producing, say, half the GDP, understandably, it means that the GDP per capita of Abidjan is not the GDP per capita of Côte d’Ivoire,” Adebayo said. “And that completely flips what is possible in terms of what are the needs and the demand of the people.” A vehicle branded with the Yango logo. Image source: Yango. The implication, for Yango, is that city dwellers in Abidjan are not poor-country consumers. In terms of their consumption behaviour and service expectations, they are closer, in Adebayo’s view, to residents of Dubai than to fellow Ivoirians in rural areas.  “They are in the same country, but they are completely different spaces,” he said. That thinking informs Yango’s investment thesis. According to Adebayo, the company’s entry strategy in any market begins with identifying the densest node of commercial activity, building profitability there, and then using that anchor to subsidise expansion into secondary and tertiary cities.  “If you don’t build a business that becomes profitable in Lusaka, you will not be able to build a sustainable business for the Copperbelt,” he said, using Zambia as an illustration.  “So, for us, the idea is basically your beachhead market always has to start from where can I build density fast, and I can build a very profitable pool, and then that profitable pool becomes what subsidises the rest of the country.” The model, he acknowledged, is not without tension. Urban-first investment risks leaving rural populations behind, at least in the near term. But Adebayo’s counterargument is that the alternative, spreading capital thinly across an entire country from the start, usually produces an unprofitable business that eventually serves nobody. Perception arbitrage In 2018, most global tech companies expanding into Africa followed a familiar route: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt. The four markets dominated investor attention and served as the continent’s largest digital economies. Uber was already established across several of them, while Bolt was expanding aggressively. Yango took a different path. It launched in Côte d’Ivoire. “Nigeria was the first market we visited,” Adebayo said. “Every person that came into the continent then all went to Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, but we were also in Nigeria. But we thought then the value proposition that we had and the opportunity that was there in Côte d’Ivoire was a lot more promising and enticing than Nigeria, but you couldn’t have taken that choice sitting at a desk in Dubai.” The phrase he uses to describe this is “perception arbitrage.” The idea is that received wisdom about African markets, which countries are promising, which are too risky, which are too small, lags reality by years.  “I always say our game is a perception arbitrage game,” he said. “The problem with that perception arbitrage is, if I tell you that the cafeteria is closed, typically, you are not going to double-check me. You just take it as a fact. The cafeteria is closed. I told you, and it’s the same thing across all African markets. People have certain stories that have been said and repeated.” The example he cited was Ethiopia. Yango entered in 2023, before the current wave of institutional interest in the country. Since then, the government has accelerated efforts to liberalise the economy, culminating in the launch of the Ethiopian Securities Exchange, which attracted 48 local and foreign institutional investors and raised more than twice its target in 2024. “We’ve been in Ethiopia for almost three years now; everybody’s opening up to