By now, most seasoned observers are aware of the complexities of understanding the growth of the middle class in Africa: unreliable data, confusing and inconsistent definitions, the way that competing narratives of understated or overstated middle class sizes don’t...
At times the size and shape of the consumer landscape across Africa can be confusing - especially when it comes to understanding what people mean by 'middle class' and what that means for the market opportunity. But there is one unassailable fact that is true now...
Lifestyle and living standards provide a tangible indicator the development of the consumer class: so what happens when you compare them to income data? We took data on ten areas for 2014: household penetration of some selected household assets, internet...
When we talk about the youth of many consumer markets in Africa, it is worth stressing how youthful they are going to be. More than 50% of the DRC’s population is younger than 20 years old. More than 80% of its population is under 40 years old. In 2050, three...
In only 5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa - all in Southern Africa - do more than 10% of households cook using electricity: Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. A theme we'll keep coming back to is how the shape of FMCG market development will be...
A useful way to think about economic development in Africa is as an ecosystem, or as we have visualized it below, like a metro map. In our map, there are a number of different lines, which represent the nine big themes we have identified that group together trends....
When Trendtype first started looking at the middle class in Africa, we were struck by two things: how unclear the definition was of ‘middle class’ and how poor quality information about the size of the middle class is. To start with, when most people in, say, the...
In our latest report, Emerging Consumer Lifestyles in Africa, we took a detailed look at how much time pressure consumers were under across under. As a general rule, across world, when incomes rise then the pressure on consumers tends to go down – they work fewer...