Sub-Saharan Africa’s Middle Class to Balloon, Standard Bank Says

Middle-class households in 11 leading sub-Saharan African economies, excluding South Africa, are set to balloon to about 40 million by 2030, as the benefits of economic growth are more inclusively distributed, according to Standard Bank Group Ltd.

About 15 million of the 110 million households in Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia are lower-middle-class and middle-class, consuming from $15 to $115 a day, the continent’s largest lender said today. About 86 percent of households are low-income, consuming less than $15 a day, it said.

“Between 2000 and 2014, we’ve seen a tripling of middle-class households across these 11 countries,” Simon Freemantle, a political economist at Standard Bank, said in Johannesburg. “It confirms that idea that Africa has structurally changed, that there has been real improvement in the last 10 years. Not just cyclical, it’s been a real structural change.”

The emergence of a middle class was found to be most profound in Nigeria, which has Africa’s largest economy. About 4.1 million households, or 11 percent of the West African nation’s population, consume $23 to $115 a day. That’s six times more than in 2000.

East Africa lagged other regions in the study, with more than 90 percent of households in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya defined as low-income.

“Africa remains predominantly low-income,” Freemantle said. “A big part of these households are exceptionally vulnerable, exceptionally marginalized and very far from being able to allocate any kind of spending to what would be defined as non-staple. These are people clinging to survival, and that’s obviously a big socio-economic challenge that needs to be faced very pragmatically.”