Dar es Salaam residents pay more to access basic needs than their counterparts in Nairobi and Kampala, a new study shows.The Cost of Living Index 2015, published by Numbeo - the world’s largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide – puts Dar es Salaam on position 18 in terms of expensiveness out of a total of 22 cities that were covered in the report.
Tanzania’s largest and richest city is only cheaper to Maputo, Harare, Accra and Luanda in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Angola respectively. Numbeo uses six factors to measure the expensiveness or cheapness of a city.
These include Consumer Price Index – CPI (the measurement of changes in the prices paid by consumers for a basket of goods and services), Rent Index (the estimation of prices of renting apartments) and Consumer Price Plus Rent Index (an estimation of consumer goods prices including rent in the city).
Other factors include Local Purchasing Power, which refers to relative purchasing power in buying goods and services in a given city for the average wage, Groceries Index (an estimation of grocery prices in the city) and Restaurants Index which compares prices of meals and drinks in restaurants and bars.
Each of these factors is benchmarked against prices offered in New York City and a conclusion is the reached. Basically, New York City’s index is 100 per cent on each aspect and therefore, a country that scores more than 100 per cent on each aspect is believed to be more expensive than the United States’ most populous city.
“If another city has, for example, rent index of 120, it means rents in average in that city are 20 per cent more expensive than in New York City. If a city has rent index of 70, that means in the average in that city rents are 30 per cent less expensive than in New York City,” reads a statement in the report.
On the CPI aspect, Dar es Salaam ranks at 62.83 –higher than Kampala’s index of 62.62 and Nairobi’s index of 54.34. This means that all the three East African cities are less expensive than New York.
Source: The Citizen, reported from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Each of these factors is benchmarked against prices offered in New York City and a conclusion is the reached. Basically, New York City’s index is 100 per cent on each aspect and therefore, a country that scores more than 100 per cent on each aspect is believed to be more expensive than the United States’ most populous city.
“If another city has, for example, rent index of 120, it means rents in average in that city are 20 per cent more expensive than in New York City. If a city has rent index of 70, that means in the average in that city rents are 30 per cent less expensive than in New York City,” reads a statement in the report.
On the CPI aspect, Dar es Salaam ranks at 62.83 –higher than Kampala’s index of 62.62 and Nairobi’s index of 54.34. This means that all the three East African cities are less expensive than New York.
Source: The Citizen, reported from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
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