The Real Price of Data: Why Cheaper Mobile Plans Cost Consumers Most

By John Kourkoutas

Kenya has the 62nd most expensive mobile plan in the world. It also has the second least affordable. Both statements are true, and the gap between them is one of the costlier errors in African market sizing.

Let’s examine the following data: it ranks the monthly price of a mobile plan that includes calls and at least 10GB of data, in dollars. The United States tops the list at US$61.96. South Africa is eighth at US$34.24. Greece, where I am writing from, is 26th at US$24.58. Kenya sits at US$12.89, and Egypt hovers near the bottom at US$7.16. Read that way, Africa looks cheap to connect to. Executives drawing up expansion plans have drawn the same comfortable conclusion.

But a price is not a burden until it meets a paycheck. So I took the same prices and divided them by monthly gross national income per capita, using World Bank figures. The table does not merely shift. It inverts.

The three least affordable mobile plans on earth are all African. Zimbabwe’s costs 8.46 percent of a month’s income, Kenya’s 7.03 percent and South Africa’s 6.55 percent. Kenya climbs 60 places, from 62nd by price to second by burden. Egypt climbs 71, from 84th by price to 13th least affordable anywhere. The United States travels in the opposite direction: it has the most expensive plan in the world, yet ranks only 61st for difficulty of payment, at 0.84 percent of income.

The comparisons get sharper. Greece costs 1.9 times more than Kenya in dollars, but Kenya costs six times more than Greece in income. Egypt is cheaper than Singapore in dollars, US$7.16 against US$12.39, yet costs 14 times as much when measured against earnings. The sticker price tells you what a plan costs. It says almost nothing about what it takes.

A Floor Beneath the Numbers

This is not an artifact of one dataset. The International Telecommunication Union’s April 2025 report on Africa puts the entry-level 2GB mobile basket at 4.2 percent of gross national income per capita for 2024. That is the highest share of any region in the world, and more than double the 2 percent target set by the UN Broadband Commission. In 29 of the 42 African countries the ITU examined, the basket sits above that target. In 17 of those, it exceeds 5 percent.

In other words, the burden is not confined to a few outliers. It is the structural condition of the continent’s digital economy.

Balance-Sheet Impact

Here is the part that costs companies money. Connectivity is a line in your customer’s budget, not an assumption in your pitch deck.

If your product needs a web portal, a video call, a cloud dashboard that refreshes or a 40-megabyte catalog, you are spending your distributor’s money every time they use it. If your app syncs in the background, it spends that money while they sleep. The sales representative in the field pays for all of it out of a plan that already consumes 7 percent of their month. A product that treats data as free is, in practice, a product that taxes its own users.

This explains several things that Western observers find puzzling. It is why WhatsApp thrives where the polished enterprise portal withers. It is why USSD and SMS remain load-bearing infrastructure in markets we casually label “smartphone markets.” And it is why offline-first design in Africa is a commercial decision rather than a nostalgic one. The firms that grasp this are not being quaint. They are matching their products to the economics of their customers’ pockets.

The Caveat Behind the Rank

One warning about the data deserves more attention. The dataset covers 96 countries, only eight of which are African – eight out of 54. Anyone sizing an African opportunity from it is measuring 15 percent of the continent and quietly guessing at the rest.

Nor are the gaps random. The missing markets tend to be those with the least published pricing, and those are often the ones with the worst affordability. The silence in the data is not neutral. It systematically flatters the picture.

The Division Is the Finding

The lesson is not that Kenya is expensive or that Egypt is cheap. It is that a ranking built on prices alone answers a question nobody should be asking. The useful question is what connectivity costs relative to what people earn, and that requires a division that takes a few minutes to perform and is routinely skipped.

The ranking is not the finding. The division is.

John Kourkoutas is business development expert that specializes in helping companies, export teams, and business leaders succeed in Africa’s dynamic and emerging markets.