One of the things I struggle with in my work is explaining to global clients that Africa’s middle class does not fit the tidy, data-driven profile found in market reports.
The term ‘middle class’ often implies a predictable lifestyle: a steady salary, a mortgage, a car loan and so on.
But that framework was built on a specific Western history. Dropped onto Africa, it splinters.
Here, middle class is not a lifestyle. It is a survival bracket.
The defining trait isn’t stability. It is agility.
Incomes are not neat rivers. They are bursts, fragments and negotiations.
A paycheck today. A consultancy gig tomorrow.
A plot of land sold. A remittance from a relative abroad.
This is not hardship dressed up. It is resilience systematized and an economy built on improvisation as strategy.
The fruits of labor here rarely serve one household alone.
The African middle class doesn’t just spend; it sustains.
One income pays school fees for siblings. Another clears hospital bills. And Another buys dignity at a cousin’s wedding.
The paradox is sharp. A new apartment with a car in the garage, but cooking on charcoal when the lights go out.
Attending weddings in style, but paying tuition in installments.
Looking upwardly mobile while juggling constant trade-offs.
The African middle class is the daily architecture of balancing uncertainty, dignity, debt, hope, and bills with unpredictable income.
Yet brands still misread the picture. They design for predictability in a society built on improvisation.
They expect loyalty in a market where value and immediacy rule.
They see lifestyle, but miss the survival calculus underneath.
The genius of this group is not that they are “in waiting” for a Western model of stability.
They are, in fact, architects of a new economic reality.
It is this foundational misunderstanding that I explore in The African Startups Playbook.
Before we measure incomes or markets, we must first recognize the Minimum Viable Relationships (MVR).
The invisible permissions, obligations, and trust corridors that make these economies possible.
Africa’s middle class crisis isn’t just about low incomes — it’s about fragile trust chains.
A family may save with a bank this year and hide cash under a mattress the next; buy insurance once and never renew; switch between global brands and backyard fixes. This volatility isn’t only poverty — it’s the absence of relationships that prove durable value.
Minimum Viable Relationships (MVR) can reset that. By forcing ventures to prove trust, permission, and repeatability before scaling, MVR prevents the cycle of half-fit products that burn trust.
Instead, it builds services people can return to with confidence. That’s how mobility compounds: not just higher incomes, but stable anchors.
If markets adopt MVR as standard, the middle class shifts from precarious consumers to trust-backed citizens — and that is how fragile aspiration matures into lasting stability.
Take the Minimum Viable Relationship (MVR) framework as Africa’s answer to MVP. It is the non-negotiable ordering for validating ventures where social-sanction risk outweighs functional risk.
It is also the smallest, lowest-risk tie that signals real demand and opens a repeatable path to value, before you overbuild product, team, or process.
In high-context markets, Minimum Viable Relationships(MVR) is the gate you must pass; without it, an MVP is simply an invalid experiment.
MVR(Minimum Viable Relationships) tests whether you’ve earned relational viability, trust, belonging, and permission — so your product can live in the real market, not just a demo.
For founders, it proves when a relationship has matured enough to translate into funding, contracts, or distribution. For investors, it exposes whether traction is real or subsidized, and whether unit economics can scale beyond “friend prices.
The leap is codifying one relationship into a playbook — so trust stops being personal and starts becoming institutional.
That is when an encounter matures into a brand, investors can underwrite growth with confidence, and ventures earn the right to scale. I unpack this fully in The African Startups Playbook. Access it via https://selar.com/1441y84771
To dismiss this as fragility is to miss its design.
What looks precarious from afar is a system built to bend without breaking.
Because the misunderstanding isn’t that Africa has no middle class.
It’s that the world keeps asking for numbers, when the answer has always been in minimum viable relationships.
We keep trying to count it with rulers never designed for this soil.
After Thoughts 1
What we call “middle class” in Africa is less an income bracket than a training ground. It teaches agility, improvisation, communal responsibility. These are not side effects, they are the curriculum.
And perhaps that is the hidden story; survival here is not only an economic condition, but also a school of resilience that the world has yet to study seriously.
After Thoughts 2
From afar, the African middle class looks precarious. From within, it is design.
The cracks outsiders point to episodic income, multiple hustles and communal obligations. These are the very mechanisms that hold the structure together. Fragility is not the right word. The right word is flexibility. And flexibility is its own kind of wealth.
After Thoughts 3
The irony is that the obsession with counting often blinds us to what truly counts. A household can tick every Western metric; mortgage, salary, car loan, and still be fragile.
Another can juggle five unpredictable streams and carry three families, and still be dismissed as “informal.” Numbers matter, but they rarely measure belonging, trust, or resilience.
After Thoughts 4
Policy too often designs for the consumer who exists in theory, not the one who exists in practice. Credit schemes assume stable paychecks.
Tax codes assume formal salaries. Social safety nets assume nuclear families.
Yet the African middle class lives in constellations, shared incomes, shifting streams, extended obligations. Until policy learns to see these constellations, it will keep legislating for a ghost.
After Thoughts 5
We speak endlessly about infrastructure as roads, grids, and broadband.
But the real infrastructure of African economies is trust, the handshake, the obligation, the invisible permission. Formal systems collapse quickly when trust erodes. Informal systems endure because trust flows first.
If policy wants to strengthen the middle class, it cannot just pour concrete; it must also fortify the social cement.
After Thoughts 6
What we call the “middle class” in Africa is not just an economic identity, it is a psychological burden. To rise is never only to rise for yourself—you rise carrying others.
Every promotion, every deal, every remittance carries a shadow of obligation. That quiet weight doesn’t show up in GDP or income brackets, but it shapes every decision. Until we account for that invisible tax of belonging, we will keep misunderstanding the very people holding our economies together.
After Thoughts 7
One hidden truth about Africa’s middle class is that wealth is never held in the present tense. It is either consumed by yesterday’s obligations or advanced to tomorrow’s hopes. Very little sits still as “today’s surplus.”
That’s why foreign models misread the picture, they measure what is visible in the moment, instead of tracing the constant time-shifting of resources. To really understand this class is to stop asking “what do they earn?” and start asking “where does their money travel?”
After Thoughts 8
The African middle class is always one minute away from low class, a deal away from momentum—and one crisis away from free fall. Their financial lives are like a matatu: full, chaotic, but somehow still moving forward.
If your brand can’t handle financial unpredictability, it won’t survive in this economy. Stability is a privilege. Adaptability and agility is a strategy.
After Thoughts 9
If you want brand loyalty in Africa’s middle class, stop asking: “How often can they buy?” Start asking: “How much must they sacrifice to choose us?” Because here, every purchase is a trade-off. A brand that understands that isn’t just selling, it’s respecting.
After Thoughts 10
Africa isn’t a subscription economy, it’s a survival economy. The average consumer doesn’t “budget monthly.” They respond to opportunity, shock, or side income. So if your brand only shows up on payday, you’re already late.
Build for the deal. Build for the moment. Build for the mindset that says:
“I don’t plan to spend today, but if the price is right, I just might.” Because in this market, access is currency, but timing is king.
After Thoughts 11
What we call middle class here is not always a class,it is a circumstance. Until the fundamentals are normalized, we are not yet witnessing mass progress. We are witnessing scattered breakthroughs in a system still calibrated for survival.
You can’t speak of a middle class when the basics remain aspirational. If toilet paper is still a luxury, if self-contained housing is a milestone instead of a minimum, then what we call “upward mobility” may simply be survival dressed in finer clothes.
This isn’t about shaming, it’s about clarity. Policymakers and brands often imagine a neat household with disposable income and steady consumption. But across much of Africa, incomes are fragmented, responsibilities are communal, and even reliable sanitation cannot be assumed.
After Thoughts 12
Agility is the ability to pivot when the ground shifts. Today’s income may not arrive tomorrow, so the middle class survives by moving quickly between gigs, side businesses, and opportunities.
Improvisation is solving with what’s at hand. When the system doesn’t provide, people design their own hacks—from borrowing a boda to run deliveries, to turning a living room into a shop.
Communal responsibility is where the real depth lies. Here, prosperity is rarely personal. One person’s salary often stretches into a web of obligations—paying a sibling’s fees, covering a cousin’s medical bill, or supporting parents. In this sense, the middle class isn’t just a bracket of earners, it is a bracket of anchors—the trusted shock absorbers of families and communities.
And yes, together these form the building blocks of trust. Without agility, improvisation, and communal responsibility, there is no resilience. With them, the middle class carries not just its own survival, but the survival of many.
Attribution: Minimum Viable Relationships (MVR) was created by Farouk Mark Mukiibi, Author of the African Startups Playbook
Canonical: africanmarketos.com/the-mvr-framework-minimum-viable-relationships/ · DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17045867
The MVR Framework (Minimum Viable Relationships)
Africa’s answer to MVP.MVR tests whether you’ve earned relational viability-trust, belonging, and permission-so your…web.archive.org
MVR: The Prerequisite to MVP in High-Context Markets.
In high-context markets, Minimum Viable Relationships (MVR) is the non-negotiable prerequisite to MVP; without MVR, an…web.archive.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20250904165432/https://africanmarketos.com/about-the-author-of-mvr/