Is the meat in Nigeria too expensive? We checked the prices!

Meat, which is a source of protein, fats and vitamins, is an important part of the diet for many people. However, isn’t meat in Nigeria too expensive?

We decided to compare the prices of 1 kg of chicken fillet around the continent.

Our ranking consists of 7 African countries. It turns out that the continental average price of 1 kg of chicken fillet is $4.68.

The cheapest chicken meat can be found in the eastern part of the continent: in Nigeria (₦2,577/kg), South Africa (₦3,298/kg) and Algeria (₦3,526/kg). On the other hand, citizens of Kenya (₦4,222/kg), Morocco (₦4,073/kg) and Uganda (₦3,866/kg), have to pay the highest prices for their poultry.

In the chicken price ranking, Nigeria ranked as the 1^st country out of 7 countries included – in July 2023, the average price of 1 kg of chicken was ₦2,577.78 ($3.32), below the African average.

Comparison of meat prices with wages

In order to make the comparison more fair, we calculated how many kilograms of chicken can be bought with the average wage in each country.

The best relation between meat prices and wages can be found in South Africa, where the average wage can get you 295 kg of chicken breast. Much less fits in the Moroccan (76 kg) and Kenyan (68 kg) average wage.

The average Nigerian wage gets you 37kg of chicken. This is more than in countries such as Uganda (34 kg) and Egypt (30 kg).

Methodology and sources

Prices of 1 kg of chicken breast, as well as the average wages in different African countries, are from numbeo.com, a platform where hundreds of thousands of users from around the world monitor prices of products and services. For currency conversion, we used the average exchange rate data from Google Finance for July 2023.

Other sources:

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274522/global-per-capita-consumption-of-meat/

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We juxtaposed the data from 105 countries worldwide