It's 2 pm; your rider left the shop forty minutes ago for a delivery that should have taken twenty. Now he's on the phone arguing with the customer for the third time: “Oga, I'm at the junction, which one is the black gate?” “I told you, after the borehole, before the carwash!”
By the time the parcel lands, the customer is irritated, you're counting the fuel and time burned on one order, and your rider is dreading the next drop-off in an unfamiliar area.
If this sounds familiar, you're not running a badly organised business. You're running a Nigerian business without street infrastructure that was built for anywhere else, which is why delivery riders get lost in Nigeria.
Sometimes It's Not Your Rider's Fault
When deliveries keep going wrong, the instinct is to blame the rider. But look closer, and a pattern shows up across almost every failed or delayed delivery in Nigeria: the address itself was never really an address, and most failed deliveries in Nigeria trace back to it, not to the rider.
Streets in newer or fast-growing parts of Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Aba often carry no signposted name at all, or carry two or three different names depending on who you ask. House numbers (where they exist) aren't always labelled in the right order. In older neighbourhoods and informal settlements, plenty of buildings have never had a number to begin with. So the “address” your customer types into a checkout form is really directions dressed up as one: “third street after the primary school, blue duplex with the black gate.”
That works fine for a human who already knows the area. It becomes a problem the moment you hand it to a rider who's never been there, or to a navigation app whose data for that street simply doesn't exist. Multiply that across a fleet doing daily drops, and it stops being one bad afternoon but how your business runs.
Why Google Maps and GPS Don't Solve It
This is the part that surprises most business owners: your rider having a smartphone with GPS doesn't fix the problem because GPS was never the issue. GPS shows a rider where a pin is on a map; it says nothing about whether that pin is accurate, or whether the “location” is actually three streets away because the app misjudged an unnamed junction.
That's why so many riders quietly abandon the app mid-delivery and go back to what actually works here: calling the customer and following spoken directions. It's not that they don't know how to use a map; it's that the map often has nothing reliable to show them. This is a problem most business owners in Nigeria miss; the delivery success rate won't change until the foundational location data does because no app can outrun bad data.
What This Is Actually Costing You
Nobody puts customers' calls as part of the expenses or on an invoice, but it costs you all the same.
There's the airtime and data, and the extra fifteen, twenty, sometimes forty minutes a rider spends circling a neighbourhood instead of making his next drop — fewer deliveries per shift, meaning either higher headcount for the same volume, or slower turnaround your customers feel directly.
Then there's the failed delivery itself: the rider genuinely couldn't find the address, turned back, and the order has to be rescheduled; that's a second trip's worth of fuel and time on an order you already tried once. And a customer whose first delivery experience involved three confused phone calls will think twice before ordering again, whether or not the parcel eventually arrived.
The problem is the location data your delivery process runs on, and that's fixable.
The Fix: Give Every Street a Real Identity
This is the exact gap Maiaddy built the loccode to close. A loccode is a short, unique code assigned to every street in Nigeria, something like LA8A 1FU for a street in Lekki Phase 1. It's not a GPS pin that might be off by a few streets, and it's not spoken directions that only make sense to someone who already knows the area. It's a fixed, shareable identity for a location that any rider, app, or business can rely on always, every time.
A customer shares their loccode instead of a paragraph of directions; a rider doing that route for the first time can find the destination with the same accuracy as someone who's delivered there fifty times before. No repeated phone calls, no rider parked at a junction waiting for someone to wave him down.
Through Maimaps, that same loccode system is now something anyone in Nigeria can search, share, and navigate by, not just large logistics fleets with their own internal address databases, but any business trying to get a parcel from a shop to a customer's gate without getting confused along the way.
Download the Maiaddy app, or explore the developer documentation if you're building loccode verification into your own product.