Bread has existed as a staple food choice for human diets for tens of thousands of years with historians dating its nascence back to the Neolithic period.
This was the period when wheat and barely became the first plants to be domesticated in the “Fertile Crescent” region of Mesopotamia (Mordern Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and Turkey) and the Nile region.
The price of staple commodities like bread are a basis for evaluating the cost of living within a region. Rising costs without concurrent upward changes in average income levels is often never a good sign for the economic pulse of a country.
With socio-economic uncertainties surrounding the conflict in Ukraine, the World Bank has given ominous warning on the palpable impact it could have in exacerbating the food crisis in Africa.
Ukraine is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of wheat. The conflict is set to have a deleterious impact on the supply chain culminating in supply-demand imbalance and inevitable price hikes. There are projections to the tune of a 50% hike in bread prices in Nigeria before the end of the 1st Quarter of 2022.
We have obtained data from Numbeo ranking 26 African cities with the highest prices of bread. All quoted prices below are in NAIRA, having been converted from their respective dollar references based on exchange rates valid as at 24th April, 2022.
1 Lagos, Nigeria 536.47 NGN
2 Kampala, Uganda 526.58
3 Kigali, Rwanda 456.82
4 Harare, Zimbabwe 413.15
5 Pretoria, South Africa 391.02
6 Durban, South Africa 387.59
7 Cape Town, South Africa 385.35
8 Johannesburg, South Africa 382.92
9 Gaborone, Botswana 327.21
10 Accra, Ghana 319.79
11 Lusaka, Zambia 317.33
12 Cairo, Egypt 286.32
13 Marrakech, Morocco 263.24
14 Agadir, Morocco 246.71
15 Casablanca, Morocco 232.99
16 Alexandria, Egypt 232.21
17 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 230.30
18 Nairobi, Kenya 208.92
19 Abidjan, Ivory Coast 205.53
20 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 181.75
21 Rabat, Morocco 174.83
22 Dakar, Senegal 125.60
23 Oran, Algeria 70.68
24 Tunis, Tunisia 70.21
25 Algiers, Algeria 67.19
26 Sousse, Tunisia. 58.17
In summary, the Nigerian city of Lagos has the highest average bread prices in the entire African continent.
