Based on the session: Winning the Informal Economy | Converge Africa 2026
South Africa’s township economy is estimated to be worth a trillion rand. Investors know it. Corporates know it. Governments talk about it constantly. And yet, as Jessica Boonstra (Founder and CEO, YeboFresh) opened a candid panel at Converge Africa 2026, she put it plainly: alongside the opportunity sits “a sad graveyard of initiatives that started off very well and somehow didn’t succeed.”
The panel, featuring Freddy Mahhumane (CEO and Founder, KasiD Township Delivery Service), Godiragetse “Godi” Mogajane (Founder, DeliveryKa Speed SA), and Craig Atkinson (Co-Founder, Revo5), spent thirty minutes doing something rare: telling the truth about what it actually takes to win in this space.
What followed was one of the most honest conversations of the conference.
When Freddy Mahhumane left the corporate world to build KasiD Township Delivery Service, he brought with him an assumption shared by most boardrooms: that the informal economy was unstructured.
He was wrong.
“We didn’t understand the chaos,” he told the audience. “We looked at it and thought, this is an informal chaos. And actually it’s a formal chaos.” The gogo selling fat cooks by the side of the road, he explained, understands her pricing, her margins, her supply chain, and her customer. She has systems. She operates consistently, rain or shine, because consistency is how trust is built. “There is no successful business that doesn’t have a system,” he said.
The insight matters because it changes how the opportunity should be approached. The township economy is not waiting to be formalised. It is already functioning. What it needs is for outsiders to stop arriving with solutions and start arriving with listening ears.
Godi Mogajane, who founded DeliveryKa Speed SA after simply wanting McDonald’s delivered to his home in a township, was deliberate about one thing from the start: the name. It had to resonate with the community, not signal outside ownership.
“The thing that matters the most in the townships is that trust element,” he said. “People need to know what you provide to them more than just the service. Are you hiring local people?”
That intentional decision, hiring locally and being embedded in the community, is what he credits for the company’s survival in a space where better-capitalised competitors have failed. But he was careful to flag another mistake well-funded entrants make: treating townships as a single, homogenous market.
“Townships are different. Soweto is very different to Alexandra and Tembisa. If you just do an umbrella approach and say we’re targeting townships, you’re going to miss a lot.”
Craig Atkinson has spent eight years building businesses in this space across three companies, including Green Riders, which trained over two thousand young people and placed them into last-mile delivery roles using electric vehicles. The pattern he keeps running into is one he calls a structural failure, not a people failure.
“When they go to a bank, they always say, you’re the unbankable,” he said. “But how do you get someone to be bankable?”
Godi put a number to it. Owner-drivers on the DeliveryKa platform are generating over ten thousand rand a week. Yet they cannot finance a second bike because banks require a payslip. “How do we get institutions around to help this guy get the second bike, get the fourth bike so that he can employ his employees and grow?”
The answer, Craig argued, requires banks and governments to come to the table with the people who have actually done the work on the ground, not to lead the conversation, but to learn from it.
Freddy’s most striking observation was not about logistics or tech. It was about access.
“I always say the next unicorn in South Africa will come from the township,” he said. “But the problem is no one is there to listen.” And the structural reason for that silence is devastating in its simplicity: the cost of getting an idea out of the township is roughly equal to the cost of feeding a family. Innovators are forced to choose.
“You have to choose as an innovator: do you go out and leave people hungry at home and chase this idea? Or do you keep the idea and make sure the family can have food on the table?”
The knowledge and access gap compounds this further. Freddy’s response cut to the chase: “Knowledge doesn’t only come in English. You need to teta, you need to bua. You need to make sure that you are in the right language so that people find it easy to understand.”
The panel closed with a simple, three-part ask from Freddy for anyone in the room with influence: go in and see what is happening in the township. Ask the people how you can help. And then listen.
Craig’s add was equally direct: if you are a venture studio running bootcamps in CBDs, ask yourself why you are not running them in a township. “People from townships don’t always have the time or capacity to come out. Let’s bring it in.”
Godi offered perhaps the most human closing: “We could have easily opened up shop in Sea Point. But we went to Cairo.” The passion for the market, the belief in its people, and the patience to understand it properly is, he said, what separates those who succeed from those who add to the graveyard.
| What This Tells Us
The township economy is not an emerging opportunity. It is an existing economy with functional systems, deep community trust, and significant innovation, that has been persistently underserved by institutions that do not take the time to understand it. The businesses succeeding here are not doing so because they have the most capital. They are succeeding because they are present, local, and listening. |
The conversations at Converge Africa 2026 made one thing clear: the informal economy is no longer a side note in the story of African commerce. It is the story. As e-commerce adoption accelerates in townships, as more gig workers build real businesses on digital platforms, and as the next generation of township entrepreneurs find their footing, the question for every executive, investor, and policymaker is the same one Freddy asked from the stage: are you willing to come to where the innovation is actually happening?
Be in the room where it happens.
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