Why Shopping Malls Struggle In East Africa?
In East Africa’s retail market, one of the most dangerous assumptions is that a fully-let mall is a healthy one. Yet that’s often when the struggle begins.
Developers obsess over tenancy targets. Lease plans become the bible. But leasing space isn’t the same as leasing meaning.
The mistake isn’t thinking tenants matter, they do. The mistake is thinking tenants automatically bring life.
But what brings a tenant in, and what keeps them in are two different things.
You can fill every unit and still have a ghost mall; where shoppers pass through, not pause. No scent, no sound, no story. Nothing interrupts routine.
Because malls aren’t containers. They’re atmospheres.
Even malls with strong foot traffic underperform not because people don’t visit, but because they don’t linger, connect, or spend. Presence isn’t participation.
Malls here don’t die when tenants leave. They die when the public stops feeling anything when they enter.
It’s not vacancy that kills a mall. It’s emotional emptiness; that emptiness that is invisible to the eye, but deafening to the experience.
People here don’t “go shopping” the way feasibility reports assume.
They stumble into commerce after work, after a wedding, during a church visit, between TikToks, or from a boda stage.
Commerce here is incidental,emotional and unscripted.
So when a mall fails to choreograph life; to catch those moments before they form, it becomes just another tiled building with air conditioning.
Life in a mall isn’t triggered by square footage.
It’s triggered by tempo, tension, and texture.
And the real question isn’t “How many tenants do you have?” It’s: “How many people came today with no plan to buy and still did?”
Because that’s the soul of retail. Life isn’t just events or ambiance. It’s the architecture of spontaneous commerce.
A mall that feels lived-in outperforms one that looks perfect. Because when you animate a mall with story, rhythm, and relevance, tenants follow, and so does revenue.
The most sustainable malls build with life first, not shops. They seed community, they prototype movement, they invite culture. They don’t wait until they’re full to feel full.
Yes, economic hardship is real but people don’t identify as middle class because of salary, they signal it through choices.
The issue isn’t missing money. It’s missed meaning. Disposable income is latent, not absent; waiting for the first moment that feels larger than the wallet.
And retail’s job is not to wait for economic perfection. It’s to stretch relevance across those moments where identity overrides income.
Otherwise, what you get is space filling without soul forming and eventually, tenants drop off not because of rent, but because the mall failed to stay alive. In this market, soul is the only tenant never renegotiates.
After Thoughts 1
A mall isn’t just a place to rent. Or to sell. Or to shop. It’s a living algorithm of energy, coded in movement, memory, and mood.
When you misread the code, rent stalls, brands fade, and shoppers vanish.
But when you tune into it, footfall turns to flow, flow turns to feeling, and feeling turns to revenue.
Because in this market, the mall that wins is the one that feels alive, even to those who came with nothing to buy.
After Thoughts 2
Shop space alone doesn’t sell. Soul does. We don’t “visit malls”, we drift into them through mood, story, and ritual.
And What pulls us back to a place isn’t price, nor promos. It’s emotional gravity; the unseen force that makes a corridor feel like culture.
Most malls here invest in floors and facades, but forget to invest in feeling. Yet without that emotional residue, no shop can sell long enough.
Because in our markets, commerce is not linear. It spirals around the places that feel alive.
After Thoughts 3
Cities are filled with buildings. But only a few become landmarks. Not because of their architecture but because of how they made people feel.
Malls that forget this end up full but forgotten.
Because in most cases sentiment scales faster than square meters. And the most powerful form of traffic? Nostalgia.
After Thoughts 4
Most malls are designed for consumers. The smart ones are designed for culture.
They know we don’t shop, we flow. We gather. We stumble. We seek moments. And when a mall syncs with that pulse, it stops being a destination.
It becomes a rhythm. A ritual. A place that sells without trying to.
After Thoughts 5
The modern mall doesn’t compete with other malls.
It competes with memory. Because people return not to spaces but to how a space made them feel the last time.
If they left bored, overstimulated, or uninspired, they don’t need to boycott. They just never come back. The mall that thrives is the one that earns a second visit without ever asking for it.
After Thoughts 6
We often frame malls as marketplaces. But in volatile economies, they become something else entirely: mirrors reflecting how a society wants to see itself, not just how it currently survives.
So when people say malls can’t work here because “people are poor,” they confuse economic struggle with psychological stillness. They mistake hardship for stasis.
A well-tuned mall doesn’t wait for prosperity. It designs for tension; curating moments where aspiration becomes ritual and identity stretches beyond circumstance.
Because retail here isn’t powered by abundance.
It’s powered by expression under constraint and the desire to feel full, even when the wallet isn’t.
After Thoughts 7
The real tragedy of East Africa’s mall failures isn’t that they misunderstood consumers, it’s that they misunderstood cities.
Malls here were built before the rhythms of the city matured. They were placed on roads without stories, surrounded by traffic with nowhere to go.
So when we blame poverty or middle-class gaps, we miss the real design flaw; Not enough malls were built for the city’s psychology, only for its projected GDP.
And cities remember when you build for metrics, not for people.
After Thoughts 8
When a mall fails, it’s not just poor economics. It’s often broken storytelling.
If the layout doesn’t lead to discovery, if the escalators don’t ascend into desire, if the light doesn’t flatter the self-image; the myth collapses.
And people stop showing up, not because they’re poor but because the story no longer includes them.
Retail isn’t transactional. It’s symbolic. And the strongest malls aren’t filled with only tenants. They’re filled with meaning.
After Thoughts 9
Human attention isn’t rational. It’s chemical. And well-designed retail spaces don’t just sell goods, they trigger neuro-associations. A scent. A layout. A certain rhythm of footfall. These become cues of pleasure, comfort, identity.
When that circuitry breaks, when everything starts feeling “same”, the body exits before the person decides to.
So the real task? Not traffic. Not tenancy. But triggering memory over and over until the mall is no longer a building, but a mental bookmark in the customer’s week.
After Thoughts 10
What we call “shopping” is often misdiagnosed. In many African cities, it’s not a transaction, it’s a navigation of identity, time, and status. A mall isn’t just a place to buy things. It’s a soft stage where people rehearse their place in the city.
But when a mall ignores this, when it forgets that movement isn’t just functional but symbolic, it begins to feel hostile, even when it’s clean, safe, and full.
Because in these markets, behavior follows belief. And belief is built through repetition, ritual, and reassurance. The best malls aren’t just visited. They’re inhabited.