This contribution investigates how national specificities shape entrepreneurship patterns in West Africa. The focus is on the relationship between regional formal frameworks such as laws, economic policies, and informal frameworks such as social networks and cultural traditions. According to comparative studies in Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Ivory Coast, there are differences in how institutional reforms and socio-cultural dynamics affect the business ecosystem. Realization of export potential of domestic enterprises, intensification of import of competitive goods of foreign production and provision on this basis of high quality of consumption of citizens and economic entities directly depend on the efficiency of organization and implementation of international cargo transportation. The basic principles and directions of interaction of logistics of international multimodal transportations with other basic types of logistics, such as production logistics, military logistics, logistics of organizations of social sphere, logistics of objects of innovative infrastructure of economy are researched in this work. The main possible contradictions between these areas of logistics activity are highlighted. The risks of activity of the companies of the sphere of international multimodal transportations are systematized, including three groups: risks of use of separate kinds of transport, modified for the sub-branch of international multimodal transportations, general risks of entrepreneurial activity (operational, financial, commercial, personnel, risk of digitalization), specific risks for the given sphere of the international contracts, including those connected with complexity of definition of an optimum route of transportation of cargoes through several countries.