These founders are building a digital solution for Nigeria’s informal retail economy   

Born from the desire to help retailers sell online, Afiari has evolved into a digital documentation platform for retail trade.

In Nigeria’s fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, the real power brokers are wholesalers, distributors, and large-scale market traders. These informal traders move nearly 90% of consumer goods nationwide. However, most of the retail economy still struggles with sales records, inventory tracking, payment reconciliation, and market intelligence.

And for many FMCG manufacturers, the supply chain goes dark the moment goods leave the factory.

This gap is what Afiari, founded by Chigozie Njoku and George Ebisike, hopes to bridge. The founders describe the platform as a “digital documentation platform for retail trade.”

“Afiari is an ecosystem product. We provide the software to physical informal-type businesses that sell FMCG products, helping them automate everything from sales to inventory and even connecting them to sales applications for payments using a POS terminal,” Chigozie Njoku, Co-founder and CEO of Afiari, says.

Interestingly, Afiari did not begin as an infrastructure play.

In early 2022, the duo launched what was essentially a digital open market. The idea emerged simply from helping Njoku’s mother sell yams online. However, building the first version of Afiari exposed a truth that the founders couldn’t ignore: informal retailers didn’t just need e-commerce; they needed systems.

“They wanted to sell online, yes, but they also wanted to know why products were missing from their shops, which items were expired, how much they were actually making, and which customers owed them money,” Njoku tells Techpoint Africa.

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As they explored the sector, the founders discovered an even bigger gap on the supply side: FMCG manufacturers had no visibility into product movement after distributors picked up goods. The lack of documentation across the value chain created blind spots for the trade chain.

In 2024, Njoku and his co-founder pivoted, dropping the marketplace-only model f...