How ATE is Helping Nigerian Businesses Scale Across Africa - CEO, Onyekachi Izukanne
As inflation continues to squeeze Nigerian households, the question of how to make everyday goods more affordable has moved from economic theory to lived reality. Imported consumer products, priced in dollars and vulnerable to global supply disruptions, have left families exposed to currency swings and rising costs far beyond their control.
Against this backdrop, Africa Trade & Enterprise (ATE) is advancing a different model—one built on local production, regional sourcing, and shorter, more resilient supply chains.
In this interview, Localised production is about reducing the exposure of Nigerian households to
Source: UGC
The biggest concern for Nigerians is rising inflation. Will ATE’s localized production model actually translate to lower, more stable prices for essential household goods?
Localised production is about reducing the exposure of Nigerian households to external shocks. When more of the value chain is in naira, not dollars, prices are driven more by local productivity and competition and less by the global shipping or FX cycle.
That starts with moving from importing finished goods to producing and packing closer to the consumer, using more regional inputs, and cutting the distance each product travels before it reaches a shop shelf.
A second effect is stability. A long global supply chain has many points of failure. A delayed vessel on one route or an export restriction in one country can empty shelves thousands of kilometres away within weeks.
ATE’s role in this is practical. Together with TRT Manufacturing and TradeDepot, we set up production and packaging capacity closer to where consumption is, and we connect that capacity to a dense network of mid-market distributors and neighbourhood retailers.
Speaking about uplifting youth employment, can you give a concrete number or example of the type of stable, technical jobs ATE is creating for young Nigerians right now?
In Nigeria, youth unemployment and underemployment together sit in double digits. Behind every number is a young person who has done “all the right things” but still cannot find a pathway into a proper career.
The important point is that these are formal, skilled positions with a ladder built in. A 25-year-old can start on a line, earn certifications on specific machines, move into maintenance, and later into shift or plant supervision.
Over time, this builds a domestic pool of industrial and technical talent, which is a basic requirement for any country that wants more control over its own production base.
If you scale that logic, the impact becomes clearer. Take a medium-sized beverage or food facility with 120 direct employees. Using conservative multipliers, that single site can sustain 250 to 350 total jobs in the ecosystem around it.
A network of ten to twenty such facilities across Nigeria and neighbouring markets supports several thousand livelihoods, most of them young, and most of them in roles that deepen local know-how instead of exporting it.
Our job at ATE is simply to make sure the ladder exists and is connected to real industries, not just to training certificates.
How does ATE, a private venture, handle the massive risk of currency volatility when sourcing materials and selling goods across markets like Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya?
The first way to manage this is to reduce exposure in the real economy. Wherever possible, we source inputs within Africa and pay in local or regional currencies.
Each time a product moves from a dollar contract to a naira or cedi contract, the FX risk for that product shifts from global markets to local productivity and competition, which consumers can actually influence.
The second step is to match costs and revenues. Products sold in Nigeria are structured so that most of the cost base is in naira. Products sold in Kenya are built on shillings, and so on. The principle is simple: do not build a business that earns in local currency but carries its main obligations in hard currency.
Third, we increasingly lean on regional financial infrastructure. Platforms like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System allow African businesses to settle cross-border trade directly in local currencies and are expected to save up to 5 billion dollars a year in transaction costs for the continent.
As Nigerian banks and businesses connect to these systems, the cost and volatility baked into every cross-border transaction should fall.
None of this removes FX risk entirely. What it does is push more of the value chain into currencies and systems that African producers, distributors and consumers actually participate in and influence.
How does ATE help the average Nigerian entrepreneur or SME connect with your massive manufacturing and distribution network? Is this opportunity only for multinationals?
In Nigeria, small and medium enterprises contribute around 48% of GDP and account for about 96% of all businesses and 84 percent of employment.
ATE’s role is to give these businesses access to an industrial backbone that would be impossible or uneconomic to build alone. Through our partnership with TRT Manufacturing, an SME that meets basic standards can use contract manufacturing or co-packing capacity that already meets regional food safety and certification requirements.
That immediately moves it from a “back-of-the-workshop” operation to a platform that can supply modern retail and export markets.
On the distribution side, TradeDepot’s network and our partners provide structured access to tens of thousands of retailers and distributors across multiple countries. Instead of spending scarce capital on trucks, warehouses and trial-and-error agents, a small brand plugs into an existing route-to-market system and pays for performance.
This is not charity. It is a simple recognition that if SMEs account for almost half of GDP and more than four-fifths of jobs, then any serious industrial platform has to be built around them, not around a handful of global players.
What is the biggest mistake local brands make when trying to move their products across the border to neighbouring ECOWAS countries, and how does ATE fix that?
The most common mistake is to treat exports as “a truck and a dream.” A brand finds a buyer in a neighbouring country, loads a vehicle, and hopes everything will sort itself out at the border and on the shelf. In reality, that is where value is often destroyed.
There are three recurring problems. The first is regulatory readiness. Each destination market has its own rules on labelling, registration, language, shelf-life claims and product composition. Many small exporters find out too late that something is missing. Goods then get delayed at the border or quietly removed from retail.
The second is reliability. Distributors in other ECOWAS markets are not looking for one-off stock-ups. They need steady volume to keep their own staff, warehouses and retail relationships viable. When supply is irregular, the local distributor shifts to another brand, often an imported one that can guarantee volume.
The third is mispricing. Brands often price as if they are selling in their home city, without fully factoring in duties, internal and external logistics, documentation, financing costs and FX risk. By the time the product arrives, either the consumer price is not competitive, or the margin has disappeared.
Can you give us a sneak peek into the Localisation Africa Index? What will be the benefit for local brands that commit to localisation and sourcing?
The Localisation Africa Index is meant to be a simple scorecard that answers one question: how African is this product’s value chain in reality, not in marketing.
The Index will look at the share of production done on the continent, the percentage of inputs sourced locally or regionally, the number and quality of industrial jobs supported in African clusters, export reach into other African markets and the efficiency and climate impact of the set-up.
It is not just about waving a local flag. It is about being able to show, with numbers, that each naira or cedi spent on a product keeps more economic value on the continent.
For brands, this matters for three reasons. First, governments and institutions like AfCFTA and Afreximbank are actively backing localisation with trade, financing and incentive tools.
Second, retailers and consumers are becoming more sensitive to where products are made and how they affect local jobs.
Third, and most importantly, localisation is a risk strategy. The last few years of global supply shocks have shown how exposed Africa is when basic consumer goods depend entirely on distant factories and sea lanes.
ATE uses the Index internally to prioritise which brands and projects to support with capacity and market access. The higher your commitment to building in Africa, the more of our platform we can justifiably place behind you.
The partnership between TRT and TradeDepot is key. Is this a permanent model, or is ATE actively looking for more Nigerian partners in logistics or manufacturing to expand its footprint?
TRT Manufacturing and TradeDepot are the starting backbone, not the full organism. TRT brings the heavy industrial experience that comes from building and running plants at scale.
TradeDepot brings the technology and on-the-ground distribution network that already connects to tens of thousands of retailers across multiple African markets. Together, they allow us to move quickly and set high standards.
But Africa’s industrialisation will not be delivered by two companies. It will be delivered by hundreds of local manufacturers, logistics firms, industrial park operators, port and corridor developers, and financial institutions that choose to align around real production and trade rather than just import arbitrage.
ATE is therefore set up as a platform that invites new partners into specific roles. That includes local manufacturers with idle or under-invested capacity that can be upgraded into regional hubs, logistics and warehousing firms that can deepen reach into secondary cities and rural markets, and partners in industrial corridors and clusters that want anchor tenants producing essential goods.
Source: UGC
What specific policy action would you like the Nigerian government to take immediately to help ATE lower prices for the average Nigerian family?
If there is one policy shift that would have a direct impact on prices over time, it is this: make it clearly cheaper and easier to import inputs for local production of essential goods than to import those goods in finished form.
A strategic import regime would do three things. First, it would treat raw materials, packaging and machinery for local production of essential goods as priority items, with faster clearance, more predictable FX access and lower friction costs.
Second, it would gradually tilt protection away from finished imports of soap, noodles, detergent or beverages, and towards serious local manufacturers that meet clear performance and quality standards.
Third, it would align this framework with AfCFTA, so that once those goods are made competitively in Nigeria, they can move across African borders with minimal obstacles.
The point is to move the economy from being a pure buyer of other people’s industrial capacity to being a builder of its own. That is what gives consumers a fighting chance in a world where global supply chains are fragmenting and where countries are quietly prioritising their own populations in times of stress.
Source: Legit.ng
