Glovo committed to supporting SMEs to digitise and grow in Nigeria – Onafeko

Glovo, one of Nigeria’s leading quick commerce platforms, is quickly establishing its foothold in the Nigerian market with plans to expand its footprint in all major cities, while simultaneously delivering an excellent customer experience to its users. In this interview with BusinessDay’s Victor Obayagbon and Wasiu Alli, Reni Onafeko, head of Growth at Glovo, spoke extensively about how the platform is helping to support SMEs to thrive, drive the concept of affordability, and expand its corporate footprint, among other things.

Glovo recently launched a new initiative, Glovo Academy. What exactly is the objective of this academy?

Glovo Academy is a learning and development initiative designed to provide in-person training and digital tools to help businesses optimise operations, boost brands, and increase online sales through the Glovo platform. At Glovo, we view every merchant onboarded as a contributor to the local economy. By digitising these businesses and providing them with the proper support, we can help them scale faster and serve more customers. So, the goal is to support these entrepreneurs and grow their operations sustainably.

How is Glovo helping to drive customer affordability by ensuring Nigerian goods are sold at affordable prices? If you have observed a price hike across markets, how is Glovo ensuring affordability now?

As you know, Glovo is a technology platform that connects customers, stores, and riders. Inherently, our platform provides transparency to all users. So, as a user visiting a store nearby and discovering that the price has increased at the point of sale, you are forced to pay for it.

With the Glovo app, you can check if the price has increased and compare it with the charges of other restaurants. You can scroll through, review the options, and decide how much to spend. In essence, Glovo is designed to offer transparency to its users. Another thing we do is that many of our partner stores, which regularly invest in promotions, use our platform.

We also offer a subscription service called Glovo Prime, where you can subscribe for a monthly fee of N1,999 and receive unlimited free deliveries every month. We’ve had this across markets, and we recently launched in Nigeria. Over time, we have seen the penetration of this grow. Essentially, we’re introducing it as a loyalty programme, and the perk is all about getting free deliveries. This significantly improves the affordability of food delivery for our users. Another initiative we are launching now amplifies the availability of affordable meals on the platform. It is not just promotions but actually meals under a certain amount. As the first thing users see, we believe that many of these product changes will enhance transparency, enabling users to shop within their budget.

Given that most of your partners are small and medium enterprises, how is Glovo helping them to thrive in Nigeria?

The first step is to provide scalable access to our customers. Platforms like Glovo allow them to reach millions without heavy CAPEX investment. For many informal businesses, their presence on the Glovo app is the first step into the digital world. And with Glovo, they can reach new customers and boost their sales up to 25%-30%. Additionally, Glovo provides data and tools that enable users and researchers to access real-time insights, such as which products are selling out the most and which products people prefer. Through Glovo, they can get that kind of data at a mass scale with no in-house build on their side. These insights help guide their decisions regarding what to stock, how to price products, and which locations to open next.

Our findings demonstrate that the data and tools we provide significantly support the growth of SMEs in Nigeria. Initiatives like the Glovo Academy provide users with training, tools, and financial support. As a company, we have supported our partners in their sustainable growth.

Most of your partners are confronted with one operational challenge or another. How is Glovo helping them?

As an organisation, we have been strong in providing hands-on operational support to our partners. Every partner or store on Glovo has an account manager who plays two roles. The primary role of an account manager is to provide hands-on operational support to partners in areas such as menu development and pricing. That is why you see our account managers regularly visiting the stores they manage, engaging with the store managers, and helping them through any issues they may have. Please remember that the ultimate goal is ensuring partners succeed on Glovo. The second responsibility for the account manager is to act as a strategic advisor to partners now that they have access to the data. With access to data, they can support menu optimisation and pricing strategies, ensuring that the stores get proper visibility on the platform and efficiently attract and retain customers. In simple terms, I would say the account managers’ role is central to supporting these partners. Additionally, Glovo facilitates access to financing through local lending partnerships. For instance, we currently have a partnership with Salad Africa, which gives partners access to loans.

Do you see more Nigerians showing a greater preference for food delivery using your platforms instead of eating at home?

I must state that the Glovo platform was not created to replace eating at home. It is about adopting a digital platform as a means of convenience. Of course, you will still eat at home, but there are occasions or moments where the situation demands you make a purchase using the platform, especially when you are stuck in traffic or you’ve had a long day at work, such that you don’t have the strength to cook at that moment. That’s the essence of having Glovo. In simple terms, the idea is not to replace eating at home but to provide an added convenience lever in their day-to-day lives.

I would say it is a fascinating time to be in food delivery in Nigeria, as the market is significantly underpenetrated. As we grow, we’re scaling the market and building a market for food delivery.

Glovo currently operates in four cities, including Abuja and Lagos. How soon are you expanding to other cities to grow the number on your platforms?

I can categorically say that we’re growing very fast. We recently expanded to Port Harcourt. We are focused on expanding our current cities because we see numerous opportunities to increase our base and presence. We will revisit expansion when the time comes because we believe it is a lever for growth. However, we are currently focused on expanding in the cities where we operate.

How is Glovo adopting technology to streamline the delivery process and provide quality services to clients?

Like I said earlier, technology is at the core of everything we do. We’re a tech platform that connects customers, stores, and riders. It is essentially the product that we sell. I think the first thing is that our logistics technology enables us to dynamically dispatch orders, route riders efficiently, and minimise delivery times for our customers. This is constantly being improved, allowing us to serve our users better. Additionally, our technology provides end-to-end real-time tracking with a live view, allowing users to see exactly where the rider is on a map and set the transparency standard in our category. As I mentioned, we provide data, access to data dashboards, and all the insights to optimise our stores’ performance and strategy. This data-driven approach enables our customers, stores, and riders to benefit from speed, accuracy, data, and ultimately, transparency across the entire ecosystem, which is crucial for scaling.

How significant is the role of artificial intelligence in improving service delivery efficiency on your platforms?

I would say, at the backend, a lot of automation takes place to make our processes more efficient, leveraging AI, route optimisation, order prediction, and probability dashboards. We leverage it extensively, both in the back end and front end. We do this on the front end, especially for users, to help personalise the experience better and improve the relevance of the content they see in the app. Therefore, it is deeply ingrained throughout the platform, particularly in the back end.

How’s your clientele encouraging you, especially in this unpredictable economy? How will you describe them? And what do you think they can do to inspire you?

Our customers are very important to us, and we’re very in touch with our customer base. We are constantly conducting surveys and focus groups and taking numerous steps to stay close to our users and understand their needs and current challenges. Once we have all the data, we adapt it to our strategies. Although last year was very tough for the average Nigerian or Nigerian consumer, particularly with a high level of inflation affecting their disposable income, it was clear to us as a business that affordability is crucial to users. Since then, we have doubled down on our efforts.

You made some projections this year. How have you met them so far?

We are growing very fast, exceeding our monthly targets. This is an exciting time for us as a business, and we expect to continue doing that in the next two months. So, there’s no challenge with that at the moment.

Can you share some of your corporate social responsibility footprints?

We take a 360-degree view of our social footprint. We do this by ensuring that our SMEs grow with us, riders have opportunities to upskill, and we support NGOs in delivering meals to their beneficiaries. Our key initiatives include SME empowerment and Glovo Academy. In 2025 alone, we have supported approximately 1,500 stores by boosting their growth and providing them with additional visibility and training through in-person sessions in Abuja and Lagos to help them digitise their operations.

These also include financial literacy training, facilitated by the Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) at Lagos Business School, and offering opportunities for loans through Salad Africa. On the courier side, we provide them with access to learning platforms where they can acquire diverse skills, including professional development, digital marketing, and languages.

We are always looking for a partnership that can develop our couriers. We have collaborated intensely with the Lagos Food Bank to reduce food waste. Sometimes, we cancel orders and donate expired products from dark stores, while the Food Bank also uses our platform to deliver meals to the beneficiaries. We support this initiative with a monthly donation to cover all transportation costs and help distribute approximately 10,000 meals each month.

What does success mean for Glovo at this moment, and where do you see Glovo in five years?

For us, success means serving all the key players in our ecosystem as well as we can and working to serve our users—stores and riders—even better. Success means effectively serving all those players, setting them up for success, and providing our users with a great customer experience.

In terms of outlook, as a company, we will continue to invest in technology and partnerships to deliver the best possible customer experience. We will focus on supporting SMEs and helping thousands of businesses digitise and grow. We will also continue strengthening our role in the local economy, promoting sustainable growth, and ultimately making our vision a reality—giving everyone access to whatever they want in their city in minutes.