Informal commerce is the biggest part of the economy here — and the least visible.

Around 85% of employment in sub-Saharan Africa is informal: street stalls, WhatsApp shops, Instagram boutiques, the side hustle that covers rent. It's the real economy for most people. And almost none of it is visible.

Think about what that means. A seller keeps their customers in their own head and their own phone. An order happens in a DM, gets paid by cash or mobile money, and then it's gone — no record anyone else can see, no trace it ever happened. Multiply that by millions of sellers and you get an economy that is enormous and, at the same time, almost entirely dark. Nobody can see its shape: who buys what, from whom, how often, or where.

Marketplaces don't have this problem, because they own everything that happens inside them — every order, every address, every repeat customer is data they hold. That's the trade: visibility in exchange for control. But most commerce here happens outside any marketplace, in conversations, which is exactly why it stays invisible. The price of staying independent has been staying unseen.

A shared delivery identity changes that without asking anyone to give up their independence. When orders move through one handle, each completed delivery becomes a structured record instead of a vanished conversation. This isn't surveillance — the seller never even sees a buyer's home, and the point isn't to expose anyone. It's that, in aggregate, patterns that were always there finally become legible: which products move in which neighbourhoods, which buyers come back, where demand actually lives.

And that legibility serves the people inside the network, not just anyone looking at it. A seller can finally see their own repeat customers instead of guessing. A rider network can route against real demand instead of hunches. A buyer carries a history that earns them smoother, faster orders the more they transact. The map is drawn by their orders, and it belongs to them.

We've seen what happens when an invisible flow becomes legible. Before M-Pesa, the movement of small sums of cash was untraceable; once it ran through a system, it could be seen, and a whole financial economy grew on top of what was now visible. Mapping informal commerce does the same thing for goods rather than money. It takes the largest, least-documented part of the economy and, order by order, gives it a shape — turning something no one could see into something that can finally be served, planned for, and built on. Not by forcing it into a marketplace, but by giving it an identity layer of its own.