What We Heard From 25 East African CPG Leaders
by Aftab Sheikh
September 3, 2026 | 05 min read
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This research exists because twenty-five people in a room in Nairobi gave us twenty minutes and an honest set of answers, and we’re grateful for it.
In August, at RI Tour Kenya 3.0 in Nairobi, we handed a 37-question research instrument to the room and asked them to fill it in before the session ended.
Twenty-five senior leaders from twenty-four organisations did. Country managers, commercial directors, ERP and data heads, national sales managers, chief commercial officers. Food and beverage, beauty and personal care, paints, chemicals, energy, pharma.
Roughly half the room owns the commercial number and roughly half owns the systems underneath it, which tells you something on its own: field execution in this market is no longer a purely commercial mandate.
We expected the answers to be mixed. On most questions they weren’t.
They can’t see what they need to see
The sharpest finding in the study came from two questions asked back to back on an identical scale: rate your current level of real-time visibility into field execution, then rate the level you believe you need to hit your growth targets.
Current: 2.56 out of 5. Required: 4.48.
A gap of 1.92 points, 38% of the entire scale, from the same respondents, on the same scale, minutes apart.
- 84% reported a positive gap
- 64% reported a gap of two points or more
- 40% rated their current visibility at 2 or below
- Zero organisations reported having more visibility than their targets require
Because both ratings come from the same person, this is a within-subject measurement, which is why it holds up so decisively at this sample size. The effect size is the largest anywhere in our data by a wide margin.
And it scales with complexity, not headcount. Organisations serving more than 10,000 outlets report a mean gap of 2.71, against 1.50 for those serving fewer than 2,000. Field-force size separates almost nothing. It’s the number of outlets to see, not the number of people looking, that determines whether an organisation feels blind.
Stuck at the midpoint of their own transformation
We asked respondents to place their current operations on four opposing scales, 1 to 7. The results were almost eerily consistent:
| Score (1–7) | Above the midpoint | |
|---|---|---|
|
Manual → Automated |
4.36 |
52% |
|
Slow → Real-time |
4.08 |
44% |
|
Reactive → Predictive |
3.68 |
32% |
|
Fragmented → Integrated |
3.68 |
32% |
Not one of the four differs meaningfully from the scale midpoint of 4.
This is not a market that describes itself as analogue. It is emphatically not one that describes itself as digital. And the shape matters as much as the level: the two axes scoring highest describe inputs: whether tasks are automated, how fast data moves. The two scoring lowest describe outputs: whether the organisation can anticipate rather than react, and whether its systems talk to each other.
These organisations have digitised activity without digitising judgement. Orders are captured electronically. Decisions are still made retrospectively.
The problem they rank first isn’t the one the category sells
We forced a ranking. Five challenges, unique ranks one to five, no ties permitted. All 25 respondents produced a valid ranking, which is unusual for a grid question on mobile and gives us real confidence in the result.
| Challenge | Priority score /100 | Mean rank | Ranked #1 |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Stockouts / poor availability |
87.2 |
1.64 |
56% |
|
Lack of Real Time Visibility |
73.6 |
2.32 |
28% |
|
Manual, slow reporting |
55.2 |
3.24 |
8% |
|
Poor beat / route planning |
45.6 |
3.72 |
0% |
|
Weak distributor collaboration |
38.4 |
4.08 |
8% |
Stockouts won outright, ranked first by a clear majority. Between the top two and the rest of the field sits a gap of nearly twenty points.
Not one respondent, not a single person in the room, ranked beat and route planning as their biggest problem.
Read that against how this category is usually marketed. The two challenges ranked highest are outcomes. The three ranked lowest are mechanisms, and they happen to be the three that most route-to-market software leads with. The category is being sold on its features and bought on its consequences.
Voice of the field
Asked to describe their field operations in a single word, 52% chose something negative. Chaotic. Fragmented. Blind. Hectic. Analogue. Suboptimal. The most enthusiastic word anyone in the room offered was “efficient.”
One data analyst at a personal care manufacturer ignored the word limit entirely:
“Driving in the rain without wipers on.”
Which is precise, not merely vivid. The vehicle is fine. The destination is clear. Visibility has failed at exactly the moment conditions demand it.
And on what would need to be true to adopt, from a cluster lead at a packaged foods multinational:
“Human capability, boardroom ambition versus reality, investment required, change mindset, real-life examples that deliver return on investment for every stakeholder in the ecosystem.”
When we coded every open-text answer, the pattern was striking. Asked what hurts, respondents talk about visibility and data blind spots, whereas proof and ROI barely registered. Asked what would unlock adoption, proof and ROI jumps sevenfold to become the largest theme. The obstacle to operating and the obstacle to buying are not the same obstacle.
What’s in the full report?
Everything above is less than one-fourth of the full picture. The paper runs to 42 pages and 23 exhibits. Inside, you’ll find:
- Three buyer archetypes, and how their behaviour, spend and appetite differ
- The perception gradient between leadership and middle management
- Benchmarks you can measure yourself against: stockout rates, manual reporting hours, SFA penetration, visibility scores
- The four indices: Pain, Readiness, Value and Budget, with the questions used to build them
- The full statistical work: correlation matrix, three regression models, principal component analysis, segmentation diagnostics
- A complete methodology and limitations section, so you can check our work rather than take it on trust
Why this isn’t only an East Africa story
The data is East African. The questions aren’t.
Every market running a route-to-market operation is somewhere on the same four axes; manual to automated, reactive to predictive, fragmented to integrated, slow to real-time. Every one of them has a distance between the visibility it has and the visibility its targets require. And most have the same gap between what leadership believes and what finance has approved.
What this study offers a global reader is a working instrument and a first set of benchmarks. The 37 questions can be run in any market in under fifteen minutes. The scores in this report give you a number to hold your own against.
If Kenya is where you operate, this is a mirror. If it isn’t, it’s a template and an early read on a market that is moving faster than most people outside it assume.
The Visibility Gap publishes next week.
Reply to this email and we’ll send it to you the moment it’s live, before it goes anywhere else.
