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The funding hurdles in $150b Africa cross-border logistics sector

Tuesday December 13 2022
Trucks wait to enter Uganda at the Malaba border

Trucks wait in a line on the road to enter Uganda at the Malaba border with Kenya. The trucking industry in Africa has only a one percent penetration rate in financing. PHOTO | BRIAN ONGORO | AFP

By MONDATO

The cross-border logistics industry in Africa, currently estimated to be about $150 billion, has one key missing ingredient: financing. The trucking industry, in particular, has only a one percent penetration rate in financing — despite its cash-intensive model that often requires some form of prepayment to take care of fuel, insurance and driver logistics.

The industry has inefficiencies worsened by the lack of a complete view of the supply chain process for goods in transit, making it difficult for financiers to understand the industry.

Despite these inefficiencies, the Africa Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) creates opportunities for digitisation and innovative financing for the cross-border logistics industry. Financiers who have for years steered clear of this industry may just need to rethink their stance — and where they have only dipped their feet in, dive deeper into the pool to reap possible benefits.

The financing gap besetting the logistics industry in Africa hearkens back to the very structure of the logistics industry in the continent today.

Multiple stakeholders

There are multiple stakeholders in any cross-border product delivery from one end to the other: the shipper, the transporter, the drivers, banks, port terminals, border officials, inspectors, and tax authorities. They operate in silos, with no central point of interaction and with limited ability to view a product’s end-to-end transportation and storage. With the industry as a whole remaining largely offline, these different components each have their requirements and ways of doing business. Physical invoices, packing lists and multiple other forms of paperwork are relied upon, often also requiring physical signatures.

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And unlike in more developed regions, where cargo is transported via commercial airlines, most cargo is moved by trucks across African countries. Adding to the extra time required for transportation via trucking, poor road networks lead to more delays in the transportation process. This then creates a long, tedious process that induces costs higher than what products cost themselves. Studies have shown that the cost of moving goods in Africa accounts for nearly 75 percent of retail prices of the goods.

The cross-border logistics industry includes both SMEs and larger multinational companies like DHL. While data is scarce regarding the number of actors and their business size, all of the companies interviewed by Mondato Insight agree that SMEs make up the bulk of the industry’s actors. Truck owners consist of mostly SMEs who often own only one to two trucks, says Mark Mwangi, who founded Amitruck, a company that connects transporters to cargo owners.

Data from 2014 indicated that out of 838 members of the Tanzania Transport Operators Association, 692 (83 percent) owned between 1 and 15 trucks, while only 146 (17 percent) had 16 trucks or more.

Standardisation

Yet the most dramatic overhaul of cross-border logistics in Africa is primed to come as a result of the AfCFTA. While implementation only began in 2021, the potential benefits for the logistics industry are massive, as intra-African trade is predicted to grow by 15 percent in 2040. With AfCFTA’s implementation set to make Africa the largest single market — consisting of up to 1.3 billion people and a combined spending power of $4 trillion — players expect easier movement of goods across borders through tariff reductions, standardisation of the logistics industry across borders and infrastructure projects necessitated by the increased freight brought about over time.

Efforts to digitise the industry have been underway as new private sector players emerge to solve different aspects of the supply chain. Most efforts are aimed at increasing visibility of the supply chain where e-logistics start-ups work to bring the different parties involved online through platforms that facilitate a wider view of different processes. Players can then see where a product or shipment is in the supply chain and plan around it. Truckers, for instance, can see where there’s cargo that needs transporting while cargo owners can see when payment has been made to release the cargo to transporters.

Similarly, Lori Systems connects truck owners or truck drivers to cargo owners and manufacturers, making massive strides in a few years of existence. Having launched in 2018, e-logistics company Kobo 360 has onboarded 10,800 truckers into its network across East Africa and West Africa since then.

Digital wallet payments

Jetstream Africa, on the other hand, seeks to aggregate the logistics players including cargo owners, freight forwarders, truckers and customs brokers online, providing a 360-degree view of the supply chain. They have also included a digital wallet for platform users to make payments faster by topping it up to pay from there. Payment through the mobile wallet enables instant release of the cargo from cargo owner to transporter, which saves on time spent ascertaining a payment has been made before shipping is done.

Yet digitising the logistics industry comes with its own challenges. Simply going paperless — as seen elsewhere in areas such as Saccos — isn’t as straightforward as it would seem.

Jean-Claude Homawoo, Co-Founder, Lori Systems says, “You have to figure out a specific pain that you are solving for each individual user. We found that you can’t assume that a clerk will use your technology. They might not be interested in it, [believing] it might just be a different way of doing the job rather than an easier way.”

Going digital may also be just another extra step for customers. To get around this, Jetstream’s CFO Axel Ewane Lobe speaks of focusing on clear pain points. Jetstream provides electronic documents, often downloadable forms that logistics personnel would require at checkpoints anyway.

By providing these forms on their platform, they are a significant step towards a one-stop shop of filling forms, making payments and tracking a shipment from source to destination.

Navigating the terrain

However, SME logistics providers — especially owners of small fleets of trucks and drivers — tend to be unattractive to bankers due to the risky nature of their businesses. There will be any number of disruptions along the way for these players, including closed borders, bandits and driver misconduct. Their SME status also creates financial roadblocks.

“[Credit] in general on the continent is very expensive, very hard to get, and is even more so for the players in transportation: SMEs, [who possess] not very sophisticated businesses and [are] unlikely to get loans from traditional financial institutions,” said Jean-Claude Homawoo, co-founder, Lori Systems.

Further complicating access to financing in the industry is the lack of reliable, consistent data on the value chains. Interactions between different players and the actual cost of particular business activities are among the areas not properly documented. Trucking companies that are individually owned may not have all the necessary documents showing the number of trips done or actual revenue generated from these trips. Their accounts may also be prone to errors, especially where they may not know what to include. Homawoo gives the example of truck owners unaware of the amount of money their trucks cost them when they sit idle, unaware of the depreciation of idle trucks as a cost that is incurred. Truck driver, Patrick Mwangi, notes further costs such as bribes for border control personnel or police officers that are not reflected in documentation.

Without reliable data points or accurate descriptions of the resources that go into cross-border logistics, predicting credit default risks becomes a hard task for bankers and other financiers.

Credit options

Nonetheless, there are some credit options available like Mark Mwangi, CEO of Amitruck, a Kenya-based logistics firm that connects cargo owners with transporters and logistics providers says.

They can get loans to grow their fleets or even access their first trucks. Most of the trucks in East Africa are financed through credit facilities, he adds.

However, financing issues arise when it comes to cash flow. Consider how a truck company would need to fuel their trucks for the week to get their trucks from point A to point B, with costs reaching upwards of $2,000 in that time.

Many cargo owners, including some manufacturing companies, would only pay the truck companies after 30 days, placing cashflow pressure at the front end while awaiting their pay.

The companies are expected as well to take on in-transit risks like bandit attacks, road accidents and delays that sometimes lead to spoiled agricultural produce.

Other delays are caused by impassable roads in harsh weather conditions, economic shocks and diseases like Ebola, which often limit cross-border operations.

“The logistics industry is very cash-intensive. Many services are payable upfront. When you add the layers of disruption faced, it simply increases pressure on [SME’s] cashflow, further necessitating extra funding,” said Lobe.

Considerable hurdles

Despite the clear need, the hurdles to accessing finance are considerable. As Jetstream’s Ewane Lobe explains, access to capital from banks in the West Africa region takes five days or longer. Considering the time-sensitive nature of the logistics value chain, slight delays translate into penalties, which adds to the final cost of transportation.

Jetstream’s work involves ensuring the capital is provided to the right stakeholders in time to avoid some of these penalties. They provide working capital facilities to their platform users, allowing them to access the capital in 48 hours — which gives them enough time to make payments to third-party logistics providers and enable a faster cargo release process.

This translates into less time spent on the supply chain, allowing goods to be transported to their destination faster.

Following in the footsteps of other industries, solutions from start-ups like Lori Systems and Kobo 360 are focusing on providing data points for financial service providers to utilize in determining credit risk. But adopters of these solutions are still only a fraction of the entire logistics industry.

Homawoo believes the opportunity is there for more players to work towards digitising the cross-border logistics industry and to provide financial products tailored to the industry.

Issues in financing arise where banks may not be willing to take on the risks associated with truckers despite having access to such data. Kobo 360 failed at its first attempt to connect financial service providers to truck companies, as the banks required that Kobo 360 assume the risk of potentially incomplete deliveries by truck companies.

Insurance product

Kobo 360 thereafter built an insurance product that insures against driver misconduct, in-transit risks and potential credit defaulting, and they later built an embedded finance product to provide credit to logistics businesses.

Lori Systems took a different route, partnering with Moove, a vehicle financing startup, to provide loans to transporters on Lori Systems’ platform, using data collected by Lori Systems.

Moove’s credit scoring model — paired with Lori Systems data on the logistics industry — may alleviate the cash flow needs of transporters, cargo owners and other players in the logistics industry, though the jury’s still out.

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