Last month, the africon East Africa team met in Dar es Salaam for a week of strategy workshops, primary-research training, and a factory visit to one of East Africa’s largest producers. The week ended with a moment that explained, better than any slide ever could, why we organise our work the way we do.
Eight colleagues from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Germany came together from 20 to 24 April 2026 in Tanzania’s commercial capital. The programme combined two days of in-person workshops, a day focused on practical primary-research methods, and a Friday factory visit to Bakhresa Food Products Limited, the beverage and ice-cream arm of one of East Africa’s largest privately held conglomerates.
Two days of workshops, built around what we actually deliver to clients
The Tuesday and Wednesday workshops were facilitated by Cédrick Lukusa, africon’s Director for East and West Africa, and Aneth Herman, africon’s Principal and Operations Lead. The agenda was shaped around the work we do every day for our clients: company strategy and the frameworks that sit behind it, including Porter’s Five Forces as a lens for structuring competitive analysis; project management under real conditions (time, risk, stakeholder pressure); primary research methods on the ground in Africa; and data cleaning and analysis, drawing on secondary sources such as ComTrade alongside datasets we build and validate ourselves in the field.
Friday: a factory visit to one of East Africa’s largest producers
On Friday, our hosts at Bakhresa Food Products Limited took the team through the production lines that supply Tanzania (and several neighbouring markets) with carbonated soft drinks, juices and ice cream under the well-known Azam brand. To put the visit in context: the Bakhresa Group operates around 30 subsidiaries across roughly 15 divisions in nine African countries. Its activities range from grain milling, beverages, food and bakery, to media, hospitality, financial technology (Azam Pesa), packaging, and the Azam fast ferries that connect Dar es Salaam with Zanzibar. By any reasonable measure, this is one of the most diversified corporate groups on the continent.
A particular thank you to Lilian Mwashigadi, Group Quality Assurance Manager at Bakhresa Food Products Limited, who hosted the team and walked us through the production process from raw materials to finished goods.
The full-circle moment: a former client’s machines running on the line
Inside the bottling facility, the team recognised the equipment producing PET preforms (the small, test-tube-shaped pieces that are later blown into finished bottles): machines from Husky Technologies. Bakhresa runs around six of these lines on this site alone.
Husky is a Canadian technology company based in Bolton, Ontario, with around 4,300 employees across 40 locations and customers in more than 140 countries. Its core products, hot runner systems and controllers for injection moulding, are central to plastic production across packaging, consumer goods, electronics, automotive and medical applications.
africon has supported Husky on several engagements over the past five years, including market opportunity assessments and partner identification across Ethiopia, Angola, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa.
2 reasons our local presence pays off in Africa’s industrial markets
1. Local relationships compound over years, not quarters
The Friday factory visit happened because Aneth Herman had built a working relationship with Bakhresa during a previous project in 2023. A cold introduction, however well crafted, rarely opens those doors at a time of the visiting party’s choosing. For industrial suppliers selling to African corporates, this is the practical version of “local presence”: not a passport stamp, but trust accumulated over years with the right people.
2. Remote-first works only with boots on the ground
africon operates remote-first across 11 countries: Germany, South Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Morocco. The model lowers cost for our clients and accelerates fieldwork, but it depends on two conditions: native-of-the-country team members in every market, and regular in-person meetings. The access to Bakhresa was only possible because the relationship was real, and the relationship was only real because someone on the team has lived and worked there for years.
Why this matters for industrial suppliers exploring East Africa
If your company manufactures industrial equipment, components or systems, and you are wondering whether East Africa is yet a serious market, the short answer is: it already is, in selected sub-sectors and for selected buyers. The question is not whether the demand exists. The question is whether you have the local relationships to be considered when the next investment decision is made, and whether you have the local feet on the ground to convert that consideration into a sale.
africon’s team on the ground, in combination with a strong network to local companies and ministries, can reduce time, costs and risk for your growth strategy in Africa.
If you are exploring East Africa, or any specific industrial sub-sector across the continent, and would like a confidential conversation, write to us at info@africon.de.
Thank you again to Lilian Mwashigadi and the Bakhresa Food Products team for hosting our colleagues, and to Husky Technologies, whose machinery on the Tanzanian production line was a subtle reminder of what good industrial product strategy looks like in the long run.
