The remittance fee gap: where sending money home is cheap, and where it still isn't
Average cost to send money to Africa is still 8.2 percent. The UN target for 2030 is 3 percent. Corridor by corridor, the picture varies enormously.
The headline number from the World Bank’s most recent remittance pricing data: average cost of sending money to Africa in the most recent quarter was 8.2 percent. The UN Sustainable Development Goal target for 2030 is below 3 percent. Most informed observers now consider the 2030 target unreachable.
Corridor breakdown matters more than the average. Sasai — zero sending fee from the UK and South Africa to Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria. PayAngel — zero-fee from US, UK, Canada to Ghana and Kenya. LemFi — zero-fee to roughly 15 African countries, making margin on foreign exchange instead. These services rely on volume and FX spread, which means they work for the large corridors (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa diaspora hubs) and break down for smaller markets.
For Burundi, which received about 49 million dollars in total remittances in 2024, no zero-fee provider finds the volume justifiable. The small-market premium is real.
Caribbean corridor pricing remains worse than the headline African averages for most pairs. The Wise Partnerize affiliate program we are tracking (application pending) is part of a broader market shift toward FX-margin pricing models for Caribbean corridors. If approved, we will be able to surface corridor-by-corridor rate comparisons in the weekly Money & Movement utility tile.
Source: Zawya/Africa diaspora remittance analysis, November 2025; World Bank remittance pricing data Q1 2026