A gigabyte of mobile data costs US$0.38 in Malawi, US$0.39 in Nigeria, and US$43.75 in Zimbabwe. That comparison has been everywhere this month, after the pan-African outlet Les Afriques published a ranking of 53 African countries on 2 October 2026 with Zimbabwe at the very bottom, the most expensive place on the planet to buy data.
The figure is real. It is also not what it looks like.
Where the number comes from
Les Afriques built its ranking on the Worldwide Mobile Data Pricing table published by Cable.co.uk, a British price comparison site. We checked Cable's own page. It does list Zimbabwe 237th out of 237 countries and territories, at an average of US$43.75 per GB, ahead of the Falkland Islands (US$40.58) and Saint Helena (US$40.13). The global average in the same table is US$2.59, which Les Afriques rounds to about US$2.60.
What neither the viral posts nor the Les Afriques piece makes clear is the date. The table Cable is still showing is its 2023 edition: its year by year history stops at 2023, and Cable's press release at the time said the 5,603 plans were collected between July and September 2023. Les Afriques calls it "the latest published edition", which is true, because Cable has not published a newer one. But the prices behind US$43.75 were gathered more than three years ago, when most Zimbabweans were still paying for bundles in ZWL, not today's USD and ZiG price lists.
Why an average per GB flatters nobody
Cable's method takes every plan it can find in a country, works out the price of one gigabyte on each, and averages them. Cable itself describes the kind of market that ends up at the bottom of its table: places where SIMs are cheap but sold with tiny allowances and single day expiries. Multiply a small, short bundle up to a full gigabyte and the per GB price explodes.
That is a fair description of how a lot of Zimbabwe buys data. Daily bundles, WhatsApp bundles and social media bundles are the everyday product, and on a per GB basis they look terrible. Les Afriques blames the same mix, plus operating costs that are effectively dollarised, and says most users buy small daily packs.
Currency made it worse. In 2023 most published tariffs were in ZWL, which was sliding fast, so any conversion depended on which exchange rate you used and on what day. As Techzim put it at the time, a bundle priced at a million is meaningless until you ask "a million of what?", and nobody agrees on which exchange rate is the honest one.
POTRAZ, the regulator, rejected the US$43.75 figure in October 2023. Director General Dr G.K. Machengete called it "not only false but misleading and malicious", saying the out-of-bundle tariff then worked out to US$3.21 per GB at the official rate, against a SADC average of US$4.60, Techzim reported. Techzim's verdict was that both sides missed something: Cable's number made no sense, but almost nobody pays out-of-bundle rates either.
What a gigabyte costs on Econet today
So what does a gigabyte really cost in October 2026? Econet's official USD bundle list gives a clearer answer than any global average. Here is what the per GB maths looks like on some of its current bundles:
- Private WiFi 10GB, 30 days: US$13, about US$1.30 per GB (2GB of it is off-peak)
- Private WiFi 20GB, 30 days: US$26.50, about US$1.33 per GB
- Data 1GB, 7 days: US$4, so US$4 per GB
- Data 650MB, 24 hours: US$3, about US$4.70 per GB
- Data 300MB plus 30 SMS, 24 hours: US$1.50, about US$5.10 per GB
- WhatsApp 120MB plus 35 SMS, 7 days: US$1, about US$8.50 per GB, and it only works on WhatsApp
- Data 3000MB, 1 hour: US$2, about US$0.68 per GB, if you can use 3GB in sixty minutes
Nothing on that list comes close to US$43.75. But the spread is the real story. On the same network, a gigabyte bought the cheapest monthly way costs less than a sixth of one bought through a small WhatsApp bundle, and the people paying the most per GB are the ones who can only afford a dollar or two at a time. Even the cheapest monthly bundle, at around US$1.30 per GB, sits below Cable's global average, but well above the 2023 prices Cable recorded in Malawi, Nigeria or Ghana.
Who pays the price
Students feel this first. A student topping up with daily bundles is paying around US$5 per GB, nearly four times what someone with US$13 to spare at the start of the month pays for the same data. Online lectures, research and assignment uploads are exactly the heavy, unpredictable use that daily bundles punish.
Small businesses that run on WhatsApp face a similar trap. WhatsApp bundles are cheap to buy but expensive per GB, and they lock you into one app. Once a business starts sending catalogues, voice notes and videos to customers, a general monthly bundle is usually the cheaper choice, even if the upfront price stings.
Content creators are the heaviest users of all, and can burn through 10GB of uploads fast. Short bursts like Econet's one hour 3GB offer can work for a planned upload session, if the network holds up.
What could bring prices down
Demand is not the problem. POTRAZ's first quarter 2026 sector report shows mobile data traffic of 179.33 petabytes, up 57.28% on the same quarter of 2025, with data now the biggest revenue line for mobile operators at 46.34%. Usage is growing much faster than prices are falling.
Competition is the weak spot. POTRAZ itself describes the base station market as "highly concentrated", led by Econet, with NetOne and Telecel largely stagnant on new sites. Three operators, one of them dominant, is not a market that forces prices down quickly.
The pressure is coming from outside the mobile networks. The same POTRAZ report credits Starlink with driving a 28.98% jump in VSAT subscriptions in a single quarter, and says satellite and fibre players are "forcing a market correction" towards competitive pricing. Starlink is home and office internet, not a phone bundle, but every household that moves heavy downloads to a dish squeezes what operators can charge for big mobile bundles. Infrastructure sharing between the three networks, especially in rural areas, is the other lever that would cut the cost of covering the country.
The takeaway
Nobody in Zimbabwe is paying US$43.75 for a gigabyte today, and even in 2023 the regulator and local tech press disputed it. But the number keeps coming back because it describes something people recognise: data that feels expensive, sold in small pieces to people who cannot afford big ones. The next time a ranking goes viral, the better question is not where Zimbabwe sits on the list. It is how much the person buying a dollar bundle every morning is paying compared to the person buying a month at a time.
Sources
- The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 237 countries, Cable.co.uk
- The real price of data in Africa: ranking of 53 countries ($0.38 to $43.75 per GB), Les Afriques
- POTRAZ says Zim has cheapest data in region, viral video says most expensive in world. Who's the liar?, Techzim
- USD Data Bundles, Econet Wireless Zimbabwe
- Postal and Telecommunications Abridged Sector Performance Report, First Quarter 2026, POTRAZ
Researched and drafted with the help of AI tools, then fact-checked and edited by our team. How we work.
