When we work with international agencies and the companies that hire them on multi-country campaigns across Africa, the first thing we try to communicate is how we actually work and the value we bring. Just as important is a genuine understanding of how nuanced the African business community and its media ecosystem really are.
A common mistake we see is treating Africa as a single market, or quietly using one country (usually Nigeria or South Africa) as a stand-in for the whole continent. It isn’t. Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Johannesburg each have distinct media cultures, regulatory environments, and reader expectations. Our approach starts from a simple principle: treat each target country as its own market, while still maintaining a pan-African lens, since many of the publications that cover the clients we work with (TechCabal, Weetracker, Semafor Africa) are themselves pan-African in scope and readership.
Local intelligence as a moat
The real advantage comes from being embedded in the business community long enough to know which journalists sit on which platforms, what they currently cover, and what they’ve historically covered. This extends beyond staff writers. Some of the most useful people in our network are journalists who no longer work full-time in a newsroom but still freelance on specific issues. These are often the people who can place your story with a top-tier publication in a freelance capacity, or introduce you to another journalist covering an angle you hadn’t even considered.
A media list organized by vertical and beat is a starting point, not the asset itself. The real value sits in the relationship history: knowing how a journalist prefers to be pitched, what time zone they’re actually responsive in, whether they read WhatsApp before email, and what they’ve covered for you before. That kind of context is what turns a cold pitch into one that gets opened first.
Knowing the publication, not just the journalist
Working with a local PR team that understands the publications at a granular level matters just as much as knowing the journalists. That means tracking a media house’s traffic numbers, its editorial focus, what actually shows up on the site versus what’s implied by its coverage patterns, and the practical limits of what a publication, its journalists, or its editors are interested in running. In our case, with a focus on general business and technology, this means following a reporter’s career trajectory and current areas of focus, and having an actual history of engagement with them, not just a name in a spreadsheet.
Coordinating across time zones and news cycles
Multi-country campaigns often involve embargoes that need to land cleanly across several markets at once. Coordinating an embargo across Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Johannesburg means accounting for different time zones, different news cycles, and different publication rhythms. This is a skill that’s easy to underestimate from outside the continent, and one we’ve built specific processes around.
Tier-differentiated pitching
Not every publication wants the same version of your story. A pan-African trade outlet like TechCabal or Weetracker is looking for something different from an international business publication that covers Africa occasionally, like Semafor. The underlying news might be the same, but the framing, the data points emphasized, and the context provided need to shift depending on the audience. We build separate pitch versions for these different tiers rather than sending one generic release and hoping it lands everywhere.
Language and regulatory nuance
Francophone West Africa, Lusophone markets, and Anglophone East and West Africa each carry different media norms, different relationships with PR as a practice, and sometimes different regulatory constraints on what can be claimed in a press release. A campaign that works cleanly in Lagos can run into friction in Dakar or Maputo if these differences aren’t accounted for upfront.
What this looks like in practice: Checker’s $8M raise
Checker’s $8M raise is a useful example of the difference between sending a press release and running a campaign. The underlying news was strong on its own: a founding team with deep experience in global financial infrastructure, institutional backing from Al Mada Ventures, and a platform already processing $3B in volume by solving a real structural problem, the fragmentation of liquidity providers that African financial institutions have to piece together just to move money.
But a strong story still needs to reach the right audiences in the right way, and that meant treating this as four or five separate campaigns running on the same timeline rather than one release blasted everywhere. The pitch for a Lagos-based business outlet looked different from the pitch for a Francophone publication, which looked different again from the framing we used for an East Africa-focused newsroom. Each version emphasized the angle that publication’s readers and editors actually care about: market structure for one, founder background for another, regional fintech infrastructure trends for a third.
Sequencing mattered just as much as framing. Coordinating an embargo across Lagos, Nairobi, and Abidjan meant working across three time zones and three different news cycles, while making sure no single market broke the story early and undercut coverage elsewhere. That kind of timing only works if you already know which journalists at which outlets are fast movers versus which ones need a longer lead time, and that knowledge comes from relationships built well before the campaign starts, not from a media list pulled together for the occasion.
The result was coverage across more than 20 publications spanning Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, and beyond, with each regional outlet reaching the audience it was actually built for rather than a single version of the story trying to speak to everyone at once. That is the practical payoff of treating Africa as several distinct markets that happen to share some pan-African platforms, rather than as one undifferentiated region.