03 January 2020

Customers in African nations are paying some of the highest rates in the world for basic internet access, with some forking out more than a fifth of average earnings, new research has found.

The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) explored 136 low and middle-income countries for its annual Affordability Report, in which it looked at what consumers were paying out as a proportion of their income.

Middle-income examples in the report included Ghana and South Africa, while low income examples were Liberia, Mali and Mozambique.

An initiative of The Web Foundation, founded by inventor of the  World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with partner organisations that include Google and Facebook, the A4AI’s definition of  affordability is 1GB of mobile broadband data costing no more than 2% of average monthly income.

However, the average across the African continent is 7.12% and in some cases 1GB costs more than a fifth of average earnings.

To put that into context, if the average earner in the US paid that percentage of their income for internet access, 1GB of data would set them back US$373 per month.

The report said such prices are “too expensive for all but the wealthiest few,” and said cost was the primary reason why around 49% of the global population is still offline.

Citizens of Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic pay more than 20% of average earnings for 1GB of data.

The most affordable rates in the continent are in Egypt at 0.5% and Mauritius at 0.59%.

Overall, the report found that costs are falling faster in low-income countries than middle-income counterparts, but in many cases prices remain prohibitive.