Cheap Is Not the Same as Affordable

Nigeria has the cheapest petrol, the cheapest mobile data and, on one widely used index, the cheapest household electricity of the six African economies compared here. It also has the largest share of its people who cannot afford a healthy diet: 81.6 per cent.

Both facts are true, and the gap between them is the point of this article. A price list tells you what things cost. It does not tell you whether the people paying can afford them, or what they get in return. Living standards sit in the ratio between prices and incomes, and in outcomes such as food, health and reliable power.

This article takes that harder route for six countries: Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and South Africa. It builds the comparison from published data on prices, wages, food costs, health spending and poverty, and it shows where the evidence is thin. It does not produce a single league table, because the data do not support one.

How the comparison was built

The method matters, because every number below depends on it.

Prices come from published benchmarks: electricity and petrol from GlobalPetrolPrices, mobile data from Cable.co.uk’s worldwide survey, and the cost of a healthy diet from the Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report. Income is represented by each country’s legal monthly minimum wage, converted at September 2026 exchange rates. Purchasing power is estimated by adjusting those wages for price levels implied by IMF per-capita GDP figures, nominal against PPP. Outcomes come from poverty, health-spending and power-outage datasets.

Three limits to keep in mind. First, the minimum wage is a floor, not a typical income. Many workers sit outside it: one source puts informal employment at about 80 per cent in Ghana and 83 per cent in Kenya. Second, the price-level adjustment is for the whole economy, not a household basket. Third, the poverty and outage data come from different years. Where a figure is weak, it is flagged.

1. Food: the cost of eating well

The FAO measures the cost of a healthy diet in purchasing-power dollars per person per day, and estimates the share of people who cannot afford it. For 2024, the figures are:

A healthy diet costs between 20 and 60 per cent more than the international poverty line of $3.00 a day. Anyone living at that line is, by definition, unable to afford it. The share of people priced out follows the cost closely: the two highest-cost countries, Nigeria and Kenya, also have the highest shares unable to pay.

Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal come out best on this measure. In both, fewer than half the population is priced out. Ghana sits in the middle at about two in three.

2. Wages: what the legal floor buys

The next step is to ask what a full-time minimum wage purchases. In the table below, “person-days” means how many days of a healthy diet for one person a month’s minimum wage can buy. A single person needs 30. A household of four needs 120.

The result for Ghana is stark. A full-time minimum wage, GH¢21.77 a day, buys fewer than 30 person-days of a healthy diet. That falls just short of feeding even one person a healthy diet for a month, let alone a household. Ghana’s floor wage was raised 9 per cent for 2026, and the finding holds even so.

Nigeria’s minimum wage, ₦70,000, is similar to Ghana’s in dollars at market exchange rates. Its purchasing power is higher because the naira’s fall has pulled Nigerian prices down in dollar terms. Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya sit near the 85 to 100 person-day mark. South Africa is the only country where one minimum wage covers a household’s healthy diet, and it is the only one of the four countries covered by one wage source that describes its system as functioning, with published rates close to actual pay.

These estimates move with the exchange rate. Weakening or strengthening each currency by 10 per cent shifts the person-days by roughly 10 per cent either way: Ghana between 26 and 32, Nigeria between 64 and 79. The ranking does not change. Kenya’s rural minimum, KSh 8,596, would roughly halve the Kenyan figure.

3. Electricity and data: where cheap prices hide the burden

Utility and data bills look small in dollars. Measured against a minimum wage, they are not. The table shows what 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 10 gigabytes of mobile data cost as a share of the monthly minimum wage.

*Treat this as unreliable. The $0.036 per kWh figure is an average across all Nigerian bands, including subsidised and rationed supply. A household on Band A, with 20 hours or more of supply a day, pays much more.

The Ghana figure deserves the most attention. Ghana’s average household price, $0.143 per kWh, is not high by regional standards. But Ghana’s floor wage is low, so 100 kWh absorbs almost 30 per cent of it. Ghana’s regulator does protect the poorest: the lifeline tariff, for the first 30 kWh a month, was set at 89.93 pesewas per kWh from 1 July 2026, about $0.08. The lifeline covers only a fraction of a normal household’s use.

For data, Nigeria and Ghana are cheapest per gigabyte, at $0.39 and $0.40. Côte d’Ivoire ($1.18), Senegal ($1.63) and South Africa ($1.81) are several times higher, though South Africa’s wage floor makes the burden lighter. Senegal is the only country where data takes more than a tenth of the floor wage.

On taxes, headline rates differ too. Value-added tax is 7.5 per cent in Nigeria, 15 per cent in South Africa, 16 per cent in Kenya, 18 per cent in Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, and effectively 20 per cent in Ghana once two health and education levies are added. Rates say little about who bears the burden, and this article has not measured that.

4. Health: who pays when someone falls ill

The share of health spending that households pay directly out of pocket is a rough guide to financial exposure. WHO modelled estimates for 2023 are:

• Nigeria: 70.9 per cent
• Senegal: 44.3 per cent
• Côte d’Ivoire: 32.0 per cent
• Ghana: 26.7 per cent
• Kenya: 24.2 per cent
• South Africa: 6.7 per cent

These are modelled estimates, not reported figures, and a low share can also mean low total spending. Even so, the contrast is large. Nigerian households carry most of the cost of illness themselves, while South African households carry very little. The share says nothing about whether the care itself is good or available.

5. Poverty and power: what the money gets

The share of the population living below the international poverty line of $3.00 a day (2021 prices) is:

• Kenya: 45.5 per cent (2022)
• Nigeria: 41.8 per cent (2022)
• Ghana: 39.0 per cent (2016)
• Côte d’Ivoire: 20.8 per cent (2021)
• Senegal: 17.9 per cent (2021)
• South Africa: 17.4 per cent (2022)

The years differ, and Ghana’s survey is the oldest, so the comparison favours the countries with fresher data. It should be read as a rough ordering, not a ranking to the decimal.

Power reliability is a third outcome, and the available numbers are old. In World Bank Enterprise Surveys, firms in Nigeria reported 32.8 outages in a typical month (2014), against 8.4 in Ghana (2013), 7.7 in South Africa (2020), 6.0 in Senegal (2014), 3.8 in Kenya (2018) and 3.5 in Côte d’Ivoire (2016). South Africa’s figure predates its worst load-shedding years. Treat these as directional only. They are enough to show that Nigeria’s low per-kWh price comes with very unreliable supply.

Putting the lenses together

No country wins on every measure, and the lenses sometimes disagree.

• Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal do consistently well among the middle group. They have the lowest healthy-diet costs, the lowest shares priced out of a healthy diet and the lowest poverty rates. Their weaknesses are higher data prices, and in Senegal’s case a high out-of-pocket health share.
• Nigeria is cheap on every price and worst on food affordability and out-of-pocket health spending, with very unreliable power.
• Kenya has the highest poverty rate in this sample and high electricity prices, but cheap data and low out-of-pocket health spending.
• South Africa has the strongest wage floor by far and the lowest health burden, yet more than half its people still cannot afford a healthy diet. That points to inequality, not to low prices or wages across the board.
• Ghana is the hardest to place. On food affordability and poverty it sits in the middle. On its minimum wage, it is the weakest of the six. That gap deserves attention: the floor wage appears to say little about how the typical Ghanaian lives, and little about how the lowest-paid are doing.

That last point cuts both ways. The minimum wage ranks Ghana last, while the population-wide food measure ranks it third from the bottom, behind Nigeria and Kenya. The difference shows that a wage floor is not a living standard. It also shows why no single number should be trusted.

What we could not measure

Some of the biggest household costs are missing, and this should be said plainly.

• Rent and housing. Most rental markets in these countries are informal. Comparable data exist only in household surveys, such as the Ghana Living Standards Survey and the harmonised West African household surveys. This article did not obtain them, so it makes no claim about housing costs.
• Transport fares. Petrol prices are available, but bus, taxi and ride-hail fares are not. Petrol: Nigeria $0.98 a litre, Côte d’Ivoire $1.55, Ghana $1.62, Kenya $1.64, Senegal $1.70 and South Africa $1.81.
• Call airtime. No usable per-minute data were found.
• Informal incomes. Most workers earn outside the formal wage system. Typical household consumption would be a better yardstick than the floor wage, and it was not available on a comparable basis.
• Water. Lifeline rates in Ghana are about $0.53 per cubic metre, and Nairobi’s first block is about $0.37, but no comparable figures were found for Lagos, Abidjan or Dakar.

What follows from this

These conclusions are the editors’ reasoning. They are not findings drawn from the data above.

If wages are the problem, low prices cannot fix it. Nigeria’s cheap electricity, fuel and data reflect a weak currency and subsidy history, and they have not made food affordable. Raising a wage floor does little if most workers are outside it. And a country that wants to lift living standards will need measurement it currently lacks: recent household surveys, published rent data and transparent wage statistics.

The simple comparison, which country is cheapest, answers the wrong question. A better one is what a household can afford, how reliably it gets what it pays for, and what happens when someone falls ill.

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