Since moving to Zambia from my home country in Northern Europe, my wife and I have been tracking our expenditure to answer the question of how much it costs to live in the city of Lusaka. What follows are my reflections after living here for about a year. .

Overview. Lusaka is an expensive city to live in. I understand very well that the majority of Zambians are getting along with much less expenditure than those welloff Zambians and the foreign expatriates. The double economy is strongly felt in Zambia, which makes life hard for the poor.

Housing. Good reasonably priced rental apartments in Lusaka can be hard to find, especially if you are new in town and do not have many contacts. Only the most expensive properties are being advertised online. The ones that are more affordable you find out about by hearing from people or reading the newspaper advertisements, which generally also tend to list only the higher priced establishments.

Our landlord prefers payments on a quarterly basis in advance, which is quite steep. Also, the lease agreement we have must be terminated three months in advance, which makes things difficult as you are committed for such a long period and do not have flexibility to move to another apartment. In my country, on the contrary, the law is more on the tenant's side, as usually only one month's notice is needed, but three to six months if the termination is initiated by the landlord.

Getting around. In terms of transport, Lusaka seems to be divided into three. Owning a vehicle seems to be an important status symbol in Zambia, and those who can afford definitely buy one. We also have a car, but also often walk, which is found strange by many Zambians – why do you walk if you have a car? As an interesting fact, in my home country many city-dwellers prefer public transport or walking as the more environmentally-friendly and less stressful and less expensive option to move around. In fact, among the most educated people owning a car can even be frowned upon. Even some MPs cycle to work.

New vehicles are cheaper in Zambia than in my country, where vehicle tax is extremely high. This does not mean that buying a new car in Zambia would be cheap. It is not and that is why even people with solid income can only afford to buy a used vehicle. Often those are bought from Japan. The delivery can take several months and can be a headache and includes a risk as you do not get to see the car before buying. So, you can only hope for the best after the purchase. I am glad that our vehicle turned out to be a good one after all the delivery troubles a well-known used car importing company caused us.

If you read the advertisements in a Zambian newspaper you will notice that many, if not most, advertised vehicles have been marked to have 'low mileage'. However, the sellers rarely put the actual mileage on the advertisements, maybe those are not so low after all. A litre of petrol in Lusaka costs about 9.89 Kwacha, it is a really high figure and I understand that to be one of the highest in the Southern African region (the cost in my country is even higher at almost 12 Kwacha per litre). In my country the prices vary from filling station to another compared to Zambia where the pricing is uniform. Yet contrary to what you could assume in the morning traffic, not all people in Lusaka are driving. For many, public transportation is the means to get around. The public transportation system comprises of minibuses charging 3-4 Kwacha per ride. The minibus network is a bit hard to get a grasp on as a newcomer and some of the minibus drivers are not exactly what one would call safe drivers. Just recently I was (again) close to being run over when walking to work, as I did not notice a minibus which was driving on the wrong side of the road. And after the incident, the driver and passengers were laughing at me. Sometimes the so-called call boys also are a bit too aggressive when they try to persuade passengers to hop on board and I have had a couple of bad experiences when they have grabbed my hand when I have been trying to walk past.

The third user group are those who cannot even afford public transportation, leaving 'zamfooting' as the only method of transportation.

I hope there will be subways or trams in Lusaka and that the reliability and reach of the public transportation system would be at another level one day.

Electricity. I understand electricity is perhaps one of the cheapest things in Lusaka and one of the cheapest in the SADC region, though of course the supply can be unreliable due to frequent load shedding and malfunctions. Unlike its neighbours who rely more on coal to produce electricity, Zambia uses mostly hydropower, so the production cost is relatively low. The electricity bill comes with a ZNBC TV tax too besides the usual excise and value added tax.

Communications. In order to keep up with family and friends back home, communication is very important for the expatriates. What you need for that is of course the internet. And that is not cheap in Zambia and due to bandwidth issues the connections are neither fast nor stable. People buy those data bundles that cost a lot per Mb as affordable unlimited data plans are non-existent, even with a slow connection.


My guess is that the MTN Browse4eva service is at the moment the best value for money internet option available in Zambia with about 25 Kwacha for 1 Gb, if you would use that much in a day. For comparisons sake, in my country 20 mbps cable/ADSL connection with unlimited data usage with close to zero downtime costs you about 150 Kwacha per month and the connections gets better all the time.

Home entertainment. For about 500 or 550 Kwacha per month you would get to watch a range of TV shows, movies, sports etc. using the South African satellite TV provider, DSTV. That price is way too high for the majority of the people. Well, the majority in Zambia do not have a TV. Or even electricity. I do not have that premium bouquet mentioned above, but have a much cheaper basic package that also has the BBC World News and the main SuperSport channel. I watch the ZNBC news also in order to see what the national broadcaster is reporting.