Côte d'Ivoire

Côte d'Ivoire is the market most foreign entrants get half-right. The shared language and the OHADA legal codes make it look like a soft landing — same forms, familiar system. That familiarity is the trap. The rules on paper are French; the way they actually run is Ivorian, and the gap between the two is where entries are won or lost.

The real regulatory timeline

OHADA registration through CEPICI is advertised as a matter of days. Registering a company and operating one are different things, and the sequencing traps — file B before A and you restart the clock — turn a three-week promise into a three-month reality. Two identical applications, same law, same forms, can be six weeks apart or two years apart. The difference is knowledge, not luck.

The tailwind: PND 2026–2030

The state has staked roughly 70% of a $200bn national development plan on private capital it does not control. Read correctly, that is not a subsidy — it is a demand signal, pointing to exactly where the government needs entrants to show up. Knowing where that tailwind actually blows is worth more than any incentive brochure.

How money moves — and where it fails

Payment here is mobile-money-first, not card-first. Wave, Orange Money and MTN Money are survival infrastructure, not features. The BCEAO's interoperability rail is real but not yet fully live, and the wallet your customers love most may not be connected yet. A checkout built on "interoperability solved it" is built on a press release.

Why well-capitalised firms still fail

Three failure modes appear in no market report: the regulatory timeline that doesn't match the official one, the distribution partner chosen from a desk, and the relationships started after launch instead of before. Each is invisible until month 14 — by which point it is the exit memo, not the entry plan.