By Kamau Kunyiha, Regional CEO for East and Southern Africa, Creditinfo
Africa’s economic future is frequently discussed in terms of scale, potential, and untapped opportunity. But for many of the continent’s businesses – especially the SMEs that drive employment and GDP – the real barrier to growth isn’t infrastructure, regulation, or even access to finance, it’s trust.
When businesses, lenders, or international buyers can’t reliably verify who they’re dealing with or assess the associated risks, opportunities are lost, trade slows down, credit dries up and procurement can become risk averse. In short, the cost of uncertainty remains high for African businesses.
What’s needed is a more robust and accessible foundation of verified business data, not just to assess creditworthiness, but to unlock growth across business sectors.
Trade credit and the price of a lack of transparency
One of the most direct casualties of limited business information is access to trade credit which is a vital tool for fuelling growth in any economy. In Kenya, only 11% of business owners and 7% of farmers have ever received goods or inputs on credit from suppliers. That’s a strikingly low figure given the scale of informal and micro-enterprise activity on the continent.
Without visibility into a business’s financial history, ownership, or legal standing, even local suppliers are reluctant to offer flexible payment terms. Credit providers demand excessive guarantees. Larger organisations stick with people and organisations they know, and in doing so often sideline other, otherwise capable, businesses. And so, the cycle continues: businesses can’t grow because they can’t access credit, and they can’t access credit because they lack a credible, verifiable profile.
This dynamic is not limited to SMEs but because SMEs make up over 90% of enterprises and up to 40% of GDP in many African countries, they are disproportionately affected. SMEs don’t just power the informal sector, they are essential players in the real economy. In Kenya, for example, between January and May this year, the majority of SME lending supported sectors like trade, real estate, transport, manufacturing, and construction, with trade alone accounting for 30.4% of all SME loans. That’s a strong signal of how deeply SMEs are embedded in Africa’s commercial backbone—and why trust in their legitimacy matters.
Business information as infrastructure
The solution to this problem isn’t just more credit. It’s about having a strong data infrastructure, the kind that helps any actor in the economy understand the basics of who they’re working with:
- Is the business formally registered?
- Who owns and runs it?
- Does it have a history of honouring financial or contractual obligations?
- Has it engaged in previous tenders or supply chains?
Modern business information reports, which draw on everything from public registries and financial filings to verified ownership and risk data, can answer these questions. When these insights are digitised and easily shared with consent, they enable faster onboarding, lower due diligence costs, and smarter risk decisions.
Data diplomacy for a continental economy
As the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) seeks to improve intra-African trade, trust must become borderless too. That means harmonising data standards and building interoperable systems for verifying business information across countries within Africa and abroad.
This is where a concept known as “data diplomacy” becomes essential: fostering regional and cross-sector collaboration so that a business in Mombasa can confidently transact with a partner in Kigali, Lagos, or Accra. Trust needs infrastructure, and in today’s digital economy, data is that infrastructure.
Broader benefits: from exporters to financial services
The trust gap isn’t just an issue for SMEs. It affects enterprises of all kinds, whether that’s financial services providers seeking to serve thin-file customers, import/export firms navigating compliance, or procurement teams under pressure to vet local suppliers quickly and fairly.
In the trade space, verified business identities can reduce costly delays at borders and build confidence in supplier performance. In financial services, structured data on business operations, revenue history, and previous credit use can dramatically reduce the time needed to assess applications or offer tailored products.
Joining the global data economy
Other regions have built similar ecosystems. In the UK, for example, Commercial Credit Data Sharing mandates banks to share SME account indicators to increase lender competition. In the Baltics, verified business profiles and credit histories have become essential infrastructure, used by lenders, trade partners, and regulators alike to streamline decisions and reduce fraud. That model, built on structured, accessible, and consent-driven data, is now being adapted for African markets, with adjustments for mobile-first behaviour, informality, and fragmented registries.
Building trust in Africa at scale
Africa’s future competitiveness depends on businesses being able to prove they are credible partners – whether they are micro-enterprises, mid-sized exporters, or financial institutions. And that credibility is built on data that can be trusted and verified.
If we want to unlock growth, we must invest in the systems, standards, and partnerships that allow business information to flow securely and efficiently. That means collaboration between governments, regulators, private platforms, and data holders to build the formal pipelines through which this trust can travel.
Verified business data may not make headlines like infrastructure deals or venture capital rounds, but it’s the connective tissue that makes both possible. Today, that data is fuelling the quiet revolution that is helping African commerce to thrive.
