Is Your African Country Too Bureaucratic? There’s A Disruptive Innovation For That

Written by Staff

Jan 24, 2016

From Quartz. Story by Yomi Kazeem.

In Nigeria, it can take up to 90 days to legally register a business — one of the reasons why the World Bank’s Doing Business report ranked Africa’s largest economy 169th out of 189 countries.

In response to this and other systemic legal hurdles, three lawyers started up DIY Law, an online service that helps navigate many of Nigeria’s bureaucratic black holes.

Just four months after opening shop, DIY Law won the SME Empowerment Innovation Challenge for East and West Africa at the Innovating Justice Awards, which aims to turn promising and disruptive ideas into effective innovations. The award came with a $40,000 cash prize.

“We have a bias for people who want to do business in Nigeria, particularly SMEs,” said Odunoluwa Longe, strategy and development lead at DIY Law.

DIY Law’s business registration product is operational, but the online legal services model isn’t original. Businesses like LegalZoom in the U.S. offer more extensive and broad legal offerings. Nigeria’s overly bureaucratic economy could help a service like DIY Law take major leaps in a relatively short time.

Nigeria is not alone in Africa in having the challenges of an overly bureaucratic system.

The African countries that rank highest globally for ease of doing business are the relatively small economies of Mauritius at No. 32, Rwanda at No.62 and Botswana at No.72. South Africa, the continent’s second-largest economy, ranked No.73 globally out of 189 countries compared to Nigeria at No. 169.