Africa eSIM

What you are actually buying for Africa

You are buying wallet balance, not a Africa bundle. The gigabytes sit in one account and work in all 46 countries below, and in 197 countries in total, each at its own published rate. Where one line covers several Africa countries, a single install carries you across those borders.

That matters on the second country. A country pack stops at the border it was sold for, so a run through three Africa countries is three separate purchases. One balance is one purchase, and refills arrive on the line you already have.

Nothing expires. Whatever you do not use in Africa is still there next trip, anywhere in the 197 destinations, and data loaded onto a line but not used returns to your balance when the line closes. Customers also get free rescue data once a month, loaded onto the line they are using when the balance runs dry, which is enough for a boarding pass or a map.

The countries in this plan are Angola, Burkina Faso, Benin, Botswana, DR Congo, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Réunion, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Eswatini, Chad, Tunisia, Tanzania, Uganda, Mayotte, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

• Each line installs in one tap, and refills arrive on the line you already have.
• Tethering included on every size, metered and on the day pass.
• A provisioning failure is refunded automatically inside 60 seconds.
• 107 cities in Africa have their own page.

Speed across Africa

The median in Africa is 29.5 Mbps, across 24 countries. It is the middle country rather than an average, so one fast market cannot lift it.

Réunion is the fastest here at 63.1 Mbps. Libya is the slowest at 20.1 Mbps. The tenth percentile across the region is 6.5 Mbps, and that is the number worth planning around, because it is roughly what a crowded station or a thick hotel wall gives you.

29 of the 46 countries are 4G only. 4G carries maps, messaging and a video call. It does not carry four people tethering off one phone at the same time.

We reach 82 host networks in Africa, Orange, Airtel and MTN among them. 0 of the 46 countries run on a single host network, and in those a failed attach cannot be fixed by switching network. A reboot, or walking two streets, is the whole toolkit.

Country packs against the balance in Africa

The country pack column uses $1.89, the median price of five gigabytes inside one Africa border. The wallet column is the tier that covers the same data, read from the same file the buy button reads. Wallet gigabytes do not expire. Country packs are bought one border at a time.

When a country pack beats the balance

Read the table, not a rule of thumb. Five gigabytes inside one Africa border costs $1.89 at the median, and 33 of the 45 country packs here work out cheaper per gigabyte than the $16.89 wallet tier. The other 12 do not.

The country pack wins when you stay inside one border and you already know which one. The balance wins the moment you cross, because the second pack is a second purchase, a second install and a second thing to get wrong on a train.

The cheapest country pack in Africa is Mayotte at $4.89. The dearest is Eswatini at $98.89. That spread is wholesale and not markup: where a market costs more to buy into, the pack for it costs more, and the wallet is priced against the whole region rather than against its cheapest corner.

What is not in the Africa list

Every country we sell in Africa is in the list below. If one is missing we do not have a pack for it, and the 100 MB a month of free rescue data is all you will have on the ground there.

What the list does carry is a page each. Every country in it opens with the host networks in priority order, the median speed, and the tenth percentile beside it, so you can read a country before you buy it. The same balance covers all 46 of them and the other 197 destinations we sell, each at its published rate, with no end date, and refills arrive on the line you already have. Ten gigabytes here is $16.89, and it stays ten gigabytes until you spend it.

Crossing borders inside Africa

The eSIM does not care about the border. It is installed, the balance is there, and nothing needs buying again. What changes is the host network, and after a land crossing that can take a minute or two while the phone lets go of the old one.

If it has not attached after two minutes, turn airplane mode on for ten seconds and off again. If it still has not, set network selection to manual and pick another network from the list. That is also the first thing support will ask you to try.

Africa eSIM questions