Companies expanding across East Africa face a recurring structural question: which decisions belong at headquarters, and which belong with the team on the ground. Gene Grand argues that most operators get this balance wrong in a specific and predictable way, centralising the decisions that should be local and localising the ones that should not be.
Why “one Africa” strategies underperform
Grand’s starting point is that Africa is frequently treated by international operators as a single market with fifty-four minor variations, rather than as fifty-four distinct markets that happen to share a continent. Research from the McKinsey Global Institute supports this framing directly: countries across the continent have grown at markedly different rates over the past two decades, with roughly half the population living in economies that outpaced the continental average, and continent-wide statistics routinely obscuring these differences rather than revealing them.
“Treating Kenya and Nigeria as the same market because they’re both in Africa is a mistake nobody would make with, say, Germany and Poland,” Gene Grand has said. “The regulatory environment is different, the consumer behaviour is different, and the pace of institutional change is different. An operating model built for one rarely transfers cleanly to the other.”
What belongs at the centre
Grand’s framework draws a firm line around what should sit centrally regardless of market. Compliance architecture, risk management and reporting standards, in his view, should be built once and applied consistently everywhere the company operates. The logic is straightforward: standards that vary from market to market create exposure that tends to surface at the worst possible moment, often in the middle of an investor’s due diligence.
Standardising the backbone does not mean standardising the offer. Bain’s work on multinationals in India makes the point sharply: the country is “a conglomeration of markets”, and winning there means tailoring product, pricing, distribution and promotion to distinct regional markets, particularly as regional and insurgent brands have gained significant share. Grand’s argument is that this kind of tailoring works best when the compliance backbone underneath it is consistent, so that local teams can adapt freely without creating new exposure.
What belongs at the edge
Where Grand departs from a purely centralised model is on decision-making authority. Pricing, hiring, marketing and day-to-day customer decisions, in his assessment, need to sit with people who understand the specific market well enough to move without waiting for sign-off from elsewhere.
“Compliance has to be non-negotiable and identical everywhere,” Grand has said. “Decision-making speed cannot be. A team in Nairobi responding to a competitor’s move or a shift in customer demand needs the authority to act in days, not weeks, and centralising that authority defeats the purpose of having a local team at all.”
Broader research into emerging-market strategy backs the underlying instinct here as well. Multinational companies pursuing growth in large, diverse emerging economies have consistently found that national-level strategies alone are insufficient, and that opportunities are often concentrated in specific cities or regions that a purely centralised strategy tends to miss entirely.
The same logic holds across the continent: a Nairobi-based team and a Lagos-based team are answering fundamentally different questions, even when the compliance framework above them is identical.
Building the model deliberately, not by default
Grand cautions against the more common failure mode, in which the centralise-versus-localise split happens by accident rather than by design. Compliance functions drift toward local improvisation because nobody built a consistent framework early. Local teams lose decision-making authority gradually, as headquarters absorbs more approvals “just this once” until the pattern hardens into policy. Neither drift serves the business.
“The operating model has to be designed on purpose,” Gene Grand has said. “Decide early what sits centrally and what sits locally, write it down, and resist the temptation to renegotiate it every tie a specific decision feels urgent. The moment you start making exceptions market by market, you no longer have an operating model. You have a series of one-off arrangements that happen to share a logo.”
For companies building East African operations from the ground up, Grand’s recommendation is to make this split explicit before expansion accelerates, rather than discovering the right balance retroactively once inconsistency has already created regulatory or operational risk.
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