Jumia Technologies, a leading e-commerce platform in Africa, has announced the planned closure of its operations in South Africa, operated under the brand name Zando, and Tunisia.

The closure of these markets will allow Jumia to focus resources on its most promising markets that have a stronger growth potential.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, and the six months ended June 30, 2024, South Africa and Tunisia combined accounted for only 3.5% and 2.7% of total orders, and 4.5% and 3.0% of GMV, respectively.

The strategic decision to close operations in these markets is expected to improve overall operational efficiency across Jumia’s business.

Francis Dufay, Jumia CEO, said, “Since assuming the role of CEO, I have focused on initiatives aimed at strengthening our business and placing us on a path to profitability. After a thorough analysis, we made the difficult decision to close down our operations in South Africa and Tunisia. Both businesses account for a negligible portion of our overall operations.

Furthermore, competitive and macroeconomic conditions in both markets have limited each country’s growth potential and their contribution to our overall business has not aligned with expectations. Decisions like these are never easy and we are extremely grateful to team members in both countries, who worked tirelessly to serve our customers every day. We are also grateful to our suppliers, vendors and logistics partners in these markets. We deeply thank them for their hard work and service to Jumia.”

Jumia believes that exiting these markets and refocusing resources on its other nine markets will leave the company better positioned to accelerate overall growth and further improve efficiency.

The Company expects to cease operations in both South Africa and Tunisia by year end 2024.

Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) and Nigerian Data Protection Commission (NDPC) have agreed to provide a framework that will safeguard personal and corporate transactions within the exporting community.

L-r: Dr. Vincent Olatuniji, national Commissioner/CEO, NDPC and Nonye Ayeni, executive director/CEO, NEPC

Nonye Ayeni, executive director/CEO of NEPC, disclosed this while receiving Dr. Vincent Olatuniji, national Commissioner/CEO of NDPC in her office in Abuja

Ayeni noted that with the huge number of registered exporters in the country striving to fulfil several international contract obligations for the export of Made-in-Nigeria products, there was a need to protect these sensitive data to ensure that Nigerian businesses remain competitive in global trade.

She observed that safeguarding personal and corporate data will further attract positive endorsements from the international community and help increase Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) into the country.

Olatuniji revealed that the NDPC was established primarily to collaborate with critical stakeholders to safeguard the rights of natural persons to data privacy, foster safe conduct of transactions involving the exchange of personal data, prevent manipulation of personal data and ensure that Nigerian businesses remain competitive in international trade through the safeguards afforded by a just and equitable legal framework on data protection.

He implored the NEPC to establish a data protection and control unit, as the unit he adviced will determine the purpose and manner for processing data to ensure that the methods by which data is collected are strictly in line with the principles of data collection.

Towards this end,  Olatunji said the NDPC was willing to provide capacity building on data protection and control for officers of the Council to make the NEPC compliant with global best practices.

The Federal Government’s commitment to ensure food security in Nigeria through the infusion of emerging technologies in the agricultural sector has necessitated the collaboration between the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and the National Agriculture Development Fund (NADF) to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, (MoU) that aims to boost productivity in Agriculture.

The NITDA’s Director General, Kashifu Inuwa, CCIE, revealed this on Thursday while receiving the NADF Executive Secretary, Muhammed Abu, and his team at the Agency Corporate Headquarter in Abuja for the signing of the MoU.

Inuwa said “President Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR is big and loud on boosting agriculture to ensure food security and today you cannot talk about boosting agriculture without talking about digital technology. And that is the reason we are here to sign an MoU to see how we can infuse emerging technologies into Agriculture so we can boost productivity in Agriculture.”

He said “Our Minister is quite interested in this as he personally has his own farm where he is doing all these and he started the conversation with you, our teams worked to draft the MoU, both legal teams reviewed the document and today we are here to sign the MoU for immediate implementation.”

“We have started our initiatives around agriculture like the National Adopted Village for Smart Agriculture (NAVSA), we have a demo farm here in Abuja, and we have been partnering with Universities across the country doing research and Startups to develop technologies and do proof of concepts with the technologies on farmlands,” said Inuwa.

“This year, we gave grants to Startups who have ideas on how to use emerging technologies to boost agriculture. And we are working with some of them in existing farms across the country to demonstrate how technology can boost productivity in that space,” he added.

Speaking at the signing the Executive Secretary of NADF Mohammed Abu Ibrahim remarked that the nexus between Agriculture and Technology cannot be over emphasized, as the agricultural sector is facing some temporary challenges like the issues of funding, climate change, insecurity and many more.

“We have seen interesting technological patterns which have given a lot of impact and  optimisation in our sector like AI, WAV, IoT and many more and we feel like without optimising agriculture and looking at it from this evidence-based perspective as a Fund we may not achieve much.

“There is no denying the fact that empirical evidence, especially data backed evidence, would help us to allocate our limited resources better. So, in our stride to see that we are doing a lot more with less we have decided to come in and especially be part of monitoring and evaluation which will eventually direct us towards achieving that mantra of ‘doing more with less’ and that is why we are here.”

He said the Fund is hopeful that this will be the first of many more of such collaborations.