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On 2 September 2026, Uber wound down operations in Nigeria and Uganda. Customers were told the service was ending. Drivers learned by email the night before and found the app empty the following morning. Uber said it would make a one-off goodwill payment. Techpoint Africa reports that qualifying drivers in Nigeria received ₦40,000, about $30, with deductions for outstanding platform debts, and that eligibility depended on recent activity. Some drivers who had been on the platform for close to a decade did not qualify.
“After a thorough review, we have taken the difficult decision to wind down operations in Nigeria and Uganda,” the company said in a statement to journalists. It added that it was reassessing its evolving business priorities and investment focus across Africa, and concentrating investment where it could create earning opportunities at scale.
The company didn’t go into specifics about why it was ending operations in Nigeria and Uganda or how many active drivers would be affected. What is clear is that demand had not disappeared. In Nigeria, Uber had helped to build the market, survived a currency crisis, a fuel-price shock and increasingly aggressive competition, and expanded well beyond Lagos. In Uganda, Uber ran for a decade and launched its first motorcycle service in Africa in Kampala. The easiest reading is that both countries simply became too difficult to operate in. Bolt and inDrive face the same conditions in Nigeria, and both responded to the withdrawal by committing to stay.
When Uber Came To Africa
Uber’s African story began in Johannesburg in August 2013. It was the company’s first African city and its fifth continent.
Lagos followed in July 2014. Cairo came in November of that year, Nairobi in January 2015 and Accra in June 2016. Dar es Salaam joined later that month. Kampala was also part of that first wave of African expansion.
There was a clear proposition behind this. African cities had large populations, difficult transport systems and fragmented taxi markets. Uber could put a layer of technology between passenger and driver and make an uncertain transaction rather more predictable: request a car from a phone, see who was coming, follow the journey, know roughly what it would cost.
In Lagos, adoption came quickly. Two years after launch, Uber said it had facilitated more than one million trips. But early Uber wasn’t relying on network effects alone. It was prepared to spend money to build the market.
In 2017, for example, Uber cut Lagos UberX fares by as much as 40%. Drivers worried, reasonably, about what that would do to their earnings. Uber promised temporary guarantees and weekly top-ups while it tested whether cheaper rides would produce enough additional demand to compensate.
Its argument was: lower fares would bring in more passengers; more passengers would mean more trips; more trips could preserve or increase driver earnings. Lagos supplied the demand, with millions of people and a fragmented taxi market that Uber could make easier to navigate.
Nigeria Still Wanted Rides
Twelve years on, Nigerians have not stopped needing rides, and demand for ride-hailing proved surprisingly resilient even as the economics around it deteriorated. In 2024, Nairametrics spoke to Lagos drivers and passengers after the removal of Nigeria’s petrol subsidy and subsequent fuel-price increases. Drivers reported an initial drop in patronage, followed by riders returning. The convenience still mattered. What changed was how people used the services: comparing several apps, shortening journeys, combining e-hailing with buses and choosing cheaper platforms when fares climbed.
The challenge for Uber lay between what a passenger can afford to pay and what a driver needs to receive.
After Nigeria removed its petrol subsidy in 2023, the World Bank calculated that average retail petrol prices had risen 163%. At the same time, foreign-exchange reforms sent the naira sharply lower against the dollar. Drivers had to carry fuel, tyres, repairs, insurance and vehicle costs in a country dependent on imported vehicles and parts and currency depreciation.
By 2024, passengers were also facing fare increases of 13% in response to another fuel price rise. The squeeze was still visible in April this year after Lagos petrol prices jumped from about ₦800 a litre to between ₦1,300 and ₦1,330 in six weeks. Drivers said some journeys were producing little more than their fuel costs.
This left Uber with three choices: raise fares too far and passengers look elsewhere; hold them too low, and drivers reject journeys, negotiate outside the app or leave; subsidise one side or the other and the platform absorbs the difference.
Uber had once been willing to do the last of those explicitly. In 2017, it was telling Lagos drivers that it had “taken all the financial risk” of its fare reduction through earning guarantees.
The Market Moved Beyond Uber
There was also another change. Uber arrived in Lagos before Nigeria’s ride-hailing market had properly formed. By the time it left, it was simply one competitor in a market it had helped create.
Taxify, later Bolt, launched in Lagos in November 2016. inDrive followed in 2019. Lagos State later backed LagRide, while a growing number of local and international platforms entered the market.
Uber’s competitors changed the model rather than copying it. inDrive allows the passenger and driver to negotiate a fare rather than leaving the price entirely to an algorithm. Its commission has also been lower. Drivers interviewed by Nairametrics in 2024 reported paying 9.9% to inDrive, against more than 20% on Bolt. By April this year, Nairametrics put Uber and Bolt at about 25% and inDrive at 12% to 15%. Those differences became more valuable as fuel and maintenance costs rose.
So valuable, in fact, that Bolt experimented with fare negotiation itself between November 2024 and February 2025. It eventually abandoned the trial, but the experiment is revealing. inDrive had introduced a different answer to one of the hardest questions in Nigerian ride-hailing: who gets to decide what a journey is worth when neither the passenger nor the driver likes the platform’s answer?
Drivers found another answer of their own. They multi-homed. A driver could keep Uber, Bolt and inDrive open and choose whichever journey made the most sense. Nigerian drivers were doing exactly that. Some also began negotiating Uber and Bolt fares directly with passengers when the app price no longer covered their costs.
That weakened Uber’s advantages. More passengers should attract more drivers. More drivers should reduce waiting times. Better availability should attract still more passengers.
But the effect is less powerful when the driver arriving in an Uber today is accepting an inDrive fare tomorrow and a Bolt journey an hour later. Uber does not own that supply. It has to win it again, trip by trip.
The African Exits Are Not One Story
Nigeria is Uber’s largest African departure. It is not its first. In less than a year, the company left four markets: Côte d’Ivoire in September 2025 after six years, Tanzania in January 2026 after almost a decade, then Nigeria and Uganda on 2 September.
Uber has said remarkably little about why. There are clues in each market, from regulation and competition to rising operating costs and increasingly difficult economics, but none gives us a definitive explanation for the exits. Taken together, however, they suggest a broader possibility: the calculation of which African markets are worth staying in may have changed.
In March 2022, Tanzania’s Land Transport Regulatory Authority capped ride-hailing commissions at 15% and removed booking fees. Uber, which had been charging drivers 25%, suspended its service the following month, saying the regulatory environment had made the business difficult to operate. The rules subsequently changed. Operators were allowed to charge commissions of up to 25% and a booking fee of up to 3%. Uber returned in January 2023, but left again three years later without giving a detailed explanation.
Côte d’Ivoire offers fewer clues. Uber left Abidjan in September 2025 after six years, without giving a specific reason. Reporting at the time pointed to competition, pricing and regulatory pressures, although Uber itself did not identify any of these as the cause. Earlier that year, the company had received formal authorisation to operate alongside Yango, an international ride-hailing service, and Heetch, a French ride-hailing platform.
Kampala still had a well-established ride-hailing market when Uber withdrew from Uganda. Sagaci Research’s 2024 survey of ride-hailing use across Africa put usage in Uganda at 36% of adults surveyed. Uber was competing with SafeBoda, the Ugandan-founded motorcycle and car-hailing platform, as well as Faras, Bolt and others, while local reporting had documented pressure on driver earnings and operating costs.
Nigeria brings several of these difficulties together. Enormous potential demand, but increasingly expensive fuel and vehicles, a weaker currency, price-sensitive passengers, numerous competing platforms and drivers able to move between them.
One theory can be set aside. Nigeria’s aviation authority had told managers on 30 July to stop Uber and Bolt operating commercially at its airports until licence agreements were signed. The timing prompted claims that the directive forced Uber out. Uber says its departure was unrelated, and Bolt negotiated an agreement and resumed.
None of this tells us exactly why Uber chose to leave these four countries, but it does indicate why a simple explanation based on market size, regulation, competition or demand doesn’t fit all four.
The more revealing comparison may be with the African markets Uber chose to keep.
What The Remaining Markets Tell Us
After the Nigeria and Uganda exits, Uber still operates in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. There is also Morocco, where it returned in November 2025 under a slightly different model.
South Africa was the beginning of Uber’s African expansion and quickly developed depth. By February 2016, Uber said it had moved more than half a million riders and was operating in five cities: Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth, giving Uber an established operation spread across several substantial urban markets.
In Kenya, Uber adapted early. It launched in Nairobi in January 2015 with card payments, then added cash five months later.
Egypt went considerably further. Cairo became one of Uber’s fastest-growing cities. By 2018, the company said more than 4 million people had used Uber across Egypt, and almost 160,000 driver-partners had worked with it during the previous year.
Uber then began building products around the market. Cairo became the first city in the world to launch Uber Bus, designed around the city’s existing minibus culture. Uber also introduced Uber Lite, a smaller version of the app built for weaker connectivity, limited data and older Android phones. In 2020, Egypt became the first country to receive Uber’s intercity bus service.
Ghana is much smaller than Nigeria, and Uber kept it anyway. Uber entered Accra in 2016 through a Statement of Understanding with Ghana’s Ministry of Transport and subsequently worked with existing taxi drivers and independent transport operators.
Morocco offers perhaps the clearest example of how far the model can bend. Uber suspended its Moroccan operation in 2018 after almost three years, saying it still lacked clarity over how services such as Uber fitted within the country’s transport rules. It returned in November 2025, initially in Casablanca and Marrakech, but not on the old terms. Rides are now provided exclusively through licensed transport vehicles, which is a reversal from the Uber that became famous for entering cities first and negotiating regulation after. In Morocco, the technology now sits on top of the licensed transport system rather than trying to work around it.
As with the countries Uber left, none of this gives us a single formula for the ones it kept. South Africa offers several large urban markets. Egypt combines enormous urban density with deep product localisation. Kenya shows a long history of adaptation to local behaviour. Ghana is smaller but has had a comparatively cooperative relationship with government. Morocco was worth returning to once Uber found a model that fitted the regulatory system.
What connects them is not simply size, or the absence of regulation. The more useful distinction may be whether Uber has found a version of its model that works within the particular economics, behaviour and rules of each market.
But the markets are only half of the comparison. Uber itself is a very different company from the one that arrived in Africa in 2013.
How Uber Has Changed Too
Early Uber was in a land grab. The prize was geography: launch cities, recruit drivers, subsidise rides and build the network before somebody else did.
Uber in 2026 is a very different business.
In 2025, its Mobility division generated $29.67 billion in revenue, up 18% on the previous year, while adjusted EBITDA reached $7.9 billion, up 22%. Across the group, Uber generated $52 billion in revenue and $8.7 billion in adjusted EBITDA.
Its priorities are changing too. On 2 September, the same day Uber left Nigeria and Uganda, chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told employees that the company would cut about 3,300 jobs, roughly 10% of its workforce. The restructuring is intended to remove management layers, simplify teams and concentrate resources on higher-priority opportunities.
At the same time, Uber is preparing to invest more than $10 billion in autonomous vehicles.
There is no evidence that money saved by leaving Nigeria or Uganda is being redirected into autonomous vehicles, and Uber has not said that the restructuring caused either withdrawal. But the decisions belong to the same period in Uber’s development: a profitable global company is cutting costs in some parts of the business while deciding where it wants to invest for future growth.
A market inside a mature, profitable company faces a different test from one inside a venture-backed company racing to establish a global footprint. In 2014, establishing a presence in Nigeria gave Uber access to one of Africa’s largest potential ride-hailing markets. Twelve years later, size alone may not be enough.
The question is no longer simply whether there is demand, but what kind of demand a market offers and what it costs Uber to serve it. The five African markets it has kept include major international destinations, where some passengers arrive with Uber already installed, a payment method already attached and an understanding of how the service works.
That alone cannot explain Uber’s choices. But it is another reason why the number of potential passengers tells us relatively little about the value of a market to the company.
Uber has not published the figures that would tell us how Nigeria performed against that test. What it has published, and what it has chosen to do elsewhere, gives us a better idea of how the test itself has changed.
A Large Market Is Not Necessarily A Valuable One
Uber’s departure should not be read simply as a verdict on Nigeria.
Nigeria can be a huge ride-hailing market without being an attractive enough market for Uber to remain in. The model didn’t stop working because Nigerians stopped needing rides. It became harder to find a price that worked simultaneously for the passenger, the driver and Uber.
For its first decade in Africa, Uber’s problem was how to enter enough markets. Its problem now is deciding which ones are still worth staying in.
What We’re Watching
- Whether Uber’s Morocco arrangement becomes a pattern, with the company entering or re-entering African markets through existing licensed transport operators rather than building around them.
- Whether the commission gap in Nigeria holds now that Uber has left, with inDrive charging drivers 12% to 15% against Bolt at about 25%.
- What happens in Ghana, one of Uber’s smallest African markets, and whether arriving visitors account for more of the demand than its population would suggest.
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