November 20, 2018//-Fraym, a leading geospatial data company that delivers hyper-local insights for 50+ African countries, announced that Ghana’s second largest city-Kumasi has a slightly larger consumer base of 1.30 million than the country’s capital of Accra with 1.26 million.
In its ‘Finding the Dynamic African Consumer’ which ranked the Africa’s Best Consumer Cities also noted that Nigeria alone has 10 cities among the top 50 urban consumer markets in Africa Among the continent’s major cities.
Nigeria’s fast-growing commercial capital of Lagos is next with 9 million ABC1 consumers. Johannesburg, despite its outsized global profile and role in African business, comes in third with 8.5 million ABC1 consumers.
Lagos alone has a larger Consumer Class than all but six African countries Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, is a vast city in a country with very little traditional market data. Fraym, however, has found 5.5 million ABC1 consumers, putting the city firmly in fourth place among urban consumer markets on the continent.
Cairo is home to the largest Consumer Class by far, comprising 16 million people. Cairo also has the greatest number of premium “A category” consumers at 3.5 million, according to the report.
Moving down the list, there are several other cities that may be surprising as well, such as Luanda, Khartoum, and Yaoundé. The data also reveal a number of sizeable Consumer Class populations in noncapital cities, such as Alexandria (Egypt), Durban (South Africa), Port Harcourt (Nigeria), Ibadan (Nigeria), and Douala (Cameroon).
A deeper look at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania demonstrates the hyper-local targeting capabilities of the Fraym ABC Classification System. Tanzania’s commercial capital has nearly 6 million people.
Roughly 2.4 million residents of Dar es Salaam fall into the more affluent A/B categories. These are the consumers with sufficient wealth to buy large household durables, frequent quick service restaurants (QSRs), and regularly purchase fastmoving consumer goods like beverages and packaged foods.
At the other end, nearly half (45 percent) of Dar es Salaam is categorized as D or E households. These downmarket consumers also purchase fast-moving consumer goods—such as beverages and household products—but typically in smaller volumes and at lower price points. In comparison, roughly 11 percent of all Tanzanian households are categorized as A/B, three times lower than in Dar es Salaam. In addition, D and E segments account for eight out of every ten Tanzanians, nearly twice as high as in Dar es Salaam.
These findings further highlight how national-level figures typically obscure local-level consumer opportunities, particularly in markets with vast income inequality between urban and rural consumers.
Fraym aggregates these segments into standardized categories that are widely understood and used by consumer-facing companies (A, B, C1, C2, D, and E). Then, “Africa’s Consumer Class” is defined as those individuals classified in the A, B, and C1 segments.
These terms—Consumer Class and ABC1 consumers— are used interchangeably throughout this report. The ABC1 category was informed by two factors in particular.
First, many consumer-facing companies currently consider A, B, and C1 segments as their target customers for more premium products and services while C2, D, and E consumers are considered more mass market.
African Eye Report
