Oluwatayo Okorie
When a port slows down in Lagos, the headlines focus on congestion, demurrage, and lost revenue. But the real story often happens further away in the open markets, roadside warehouses, and community networks that quietly adjust to keep goods moving. In many African cities, it is not the formal supply chain that absorbs the shock first; it is the informal one. And in a world where volatility is becoming the norm, these systems may hold lessons for everyone from multinational planners to policymakers in Amsterdam or Accra.
I first saw this during the early months of COVID-19. While multinationals scrambled to import branded hand sanitisers, battling port delays, global shortages, and mounting freight costs, local manufacturers, small shop owners, and even individuals began producing sanitisers almost overnight. Some blended and bottled them by hand; others created improvised labels and built hyperlocal distribution routes. Within days, neighbourhoods were supplied through channels that had nothing to do with official procurement pipelines. The informal economy didn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions; it responded to need.
This is the first lesson: informal supply chains possess a hyper-local risk radar that most sophisticated forecasting systems cannot match. When a distributor notices customers buying “just one carton” instead of their usual weekly order, she adjusts instantly. She doesn’t need a dashboard to tell her demand has shifted; she feels it in the rhythm of her day. That sensitivity, built through lived experience rather than data models, is a capability global supply chains continue to undervalue.
The second lesson is flexibility. Formal systems often pride themselves on scale. Informal systems survive through adaptability. A mechanic in Aba can source an urgent spare part within hours because five informal wholesalers are willing to open their shops after closing time. A cross-border trader can pivot from rice to palm oil in a week because she doesn’t require a board meeting to approve a change. These micro-decisions may look small in isolation, but together they stabilise markets when formal structures freeze.
Next is speed, and speed rarely comes from technology alone. I once worked with a sales and distribution team operating across cities where roadblocks and fuel shortages were normal. The most reliable updates didn’t come from GPS trackers; they came from truck drivers relaying information through informal WhatsApp groups. A quick message, “Traffic jam at Ore”, could help a logistics manager redirect dozens of trucks within minutes. No enterprise system matched that level of real-time responsiveness.
To be clear, informality is not a romantic substitute for structured supply chains. It can hide inefficiencies, tax leakage, and gaps in worker protection. But it reveals something important: resilience is not always rooted in scale, capital, or software. Sometimes it comes from the ability to improvise under pressure, a skill formal systems have not been designed for.
This is a global lesson. Recent events, pandemic shortages, Red Sea rerouting, and energy volatility, exposed how brittle many Western supply chains truly are. Optimised for cost and precision, they buckled under uncertainty. Meanwhile, African informal systems, long accustomed to unpredictability, absorbed shocks with the quiet confidence of people who navigate volatility daily.
In other words, what looks like disorder from a distance is often a highly evolved operating model up close.
These networks practise redundancy without using the term. They diversify suppliers instinctively. They run scenarios because experience has taught them not to rely on a single path. They use trust-based contracts in ways procurement systems still cannot automate, a practice one senior professional once described to me as “spray and pray”, but which in reality is a sophisticated hedge against risk.
Consider the mother in Kano who buys staples from three different kiosks because she has experienced too many price fluctuations. Or the transporter who maintains multiple fuel sources because scarcity can happen overnight. These are not inefficiencies. They are rational adaptations to systemic risk; the same resilience global organisations are now trying to engineer through costly transformation programmes.
So what can the world learn from systems that have always operated on the edge?
· First, listen to the people closest to the volatility. Their feedback loops are faster than most reporting structures.
· Second, build supply chains that bend without breaking. Informal systems survive because they don’t commit to a single rigid path.
· Third, value human intelligence alongside digital intelligence. Technology should amplify intuition, not replace it.
Finally, organisations must look beyond the boardroom to understand how economies actually function. The mother buying groceries in sachets, the trader absorbing cross-border risks, the driver rerouting before dawn; they are not peripheral actors. They are the operational backbone of markets that billions depend on.
In a world where volatility is global rather than local, the supply chain lessons we need may not come from the San Francisco Bay Area or Brussels. They may come from places that have never had the luxury of stability, places where resilience isn’t a strategy but a survival skill.
Informal economies are not perfect. But they know how to keep moving. And in today’s fragile world, that may be the most valuable lesson of all.
Oluwatayo Okorie is a supply chain leader with experience across Africa, the UK, and Canada. She has led supply chains, logistics, and operations in volatile markets and contributes to the development of global supply-chain learning through her work with organisations such as ASCM. Her writing focuses on resilience, emerging-market dynamics, and the overlooked human intelligence behind complex supply chains.
Source: Businessday.ng | Read the Full Story…
