Core
UEMOA / Francophone
Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Benin, Togo, Guinea-Bissau. Shared currency, shared central bank, shared commercial law — and materially different administrative practice in each.
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The firm
An advisory practice built around one question: what does a company actually need to know before it commits capital to a West African market?
Introduction
We sit between the investment case and the operating environment.
Horizon Global Strategies is an independent advisory firm based in Abidjan. We work with international investors, operating companies, development finance institutions and law firms on the non-financial side of doing business in West Africa — the political, regulatory, reputational and counterparty questions that a spreadsheet cannot answer.
The choice of base is deliberate. Abidjan is the commercial centre of Francophone West Africa: it hosts the African Development Bank and the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration, the judicial organ of the OHADA business-law treaty that governs commercial law across seventeen member states. Decisions that shape the regional business environment are made, litigated and enforced here.
We are deliberately a specialist firm rather than a generalist one. We do not cover every market on the continent, and we say so early when a request sits outside what we can competently do.
Coverage
Where we work.
Our core coverage is the eight-member UEMOA monetary union and the Anglophone markets immediately adjacent to it. We also track the Sahel states whose recent departure from ECOWAS has changed the trade and security picture for everyone operating in the region.
Adjacent
Anglophone West Africa
Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone. Different legal traditions and currency regimes, but increasingly linked to Abidjan through logistics, banking and regional distribution.
Watch
The Sahel
Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger. We do not present these as normal operating environments. We do monitor them closely, because what happens there sets security, trade and supply-chain conditions for the coastal states.
Sectors
Where our knowledge is deepest.
We take work in these sectors because we can source into them properly. Outside them we will either decline or tell you plainly that we would be building the network on your budget.
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Agribusiness & soft commodities
Cocoa, cashew, rubber, palm and cotton. Côte d'Ivoire is the world's largest cocoa producer, and the regulatory apparatus around that — pricing councils, export licensing, traceability and deforestation compliance — is the single most consequential policy environment in the country.
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Energy, mining & power
Gold and manganese, offshore hydrocarbons, gas-to-power and grid expansion. Mining codes, production-sharing terms and local content obligations vary sharply across the region and are revised more often than investors expect.
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Infrastructure & logistics
Port, road and corridor projects, including the Abidjan and San Pédro port complexes and the landlocked-country corridors that depend on them. Concession structures, PPP frameworks and sovereign counterparty risk.
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Financial services & payments
Banking, insurance, mobile money and cross-border payments under BCEAO supervision, plus the AML and beneficial-ownership expectations that come with a regional licence.
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Consumer, telecoms & distribution
Route-to-market design, distributor selection and pricing in markets where informal channels still carry a large share of volume, and where a single distributor relationship can define your position for a decade.
Principles
What we will and will not do.
Advisory work in frontier markets attracts requests that should not be accepted. Being explicit about the line is easier for everyone than negotiating it later.
01
Independence over retention
We give the finding, not the finding the client hoped for. If our diligence kills a transaction, that is the work functioning correctly.
02
Sourcing is disclosed
Every material claim in a deliverable carries its source and a stated confidence level. You should be able to see which conclusions rest on a document and which rest on a conversation.
03
Lawful methods only
Public records, licensed data, open sources and consenting interviews. No pretexting, no data obtained in breach of confidence, no payments to officials on a client's behalf under any framing.
04
Conflicts checked first
We screen for conflicts before scoping, and we decline rather than build an information wall when both sides of a matter are in play.
Want to know whether we are the right firm?
Describe the situation. We will tell you if it fits our coverage, and if it does not, we will usually be able to point you at someone whose it does.