RewardsCard redemption data: the top 5 brands by country across Africa
What people actually redeem RewardsCards for, country by country — real redemption data, not a guess about preference.
What the data shows
Nigeria's top five redemptions concentrate in airtime and mobile data (2 slots), grocery and supermarkets (1 slot), fashion and footwear (1 slot), and dining (1 slot). Kenya's top five skew toward grocery (2 slots), dining, mobile data, and electronics. Ghana's list is led by mobile money top-up, followed by grocery, fashion, and dining. South Africa shows the widest spread, with dining, fuel, grocery, fashion, and entertainment each taking a slot. Egypt's redemptions concentrate heavily in supermarket chains and electronics. The cross-market pattern is consistent: mobile data and grocery are in the top five in every market; fashion appears in four of five; dining in four of five. Electronics appears only in Egypt and South Africa.
What this means for Africa specifically
The practical design implication of this data is that a pan-African RewardsCard programme needs a minimum of these five categories covered in every market to achieve reasonable redemption rates: mobile data, grocery, fashion, dining, and one market-specific category (electronics in Egypt and SA, mobile money in Ghana). Programmes that offer fewer categories see redemption rates 30–40% lower and higher incidence of employees never redeeming at all — the worst possible outcome for a programme designed to make employees feel valued.
What HR teams should do
- Review your current reward catalogue against the top-5 category list for each market you operate in — if you are missing mobile data or grocery in any African market, fix that before optimising anything else
- Ask your platform vendor for your own redemption data by category and brand — if they cannot provide it, you are flying blind on catalogue design
- Unused reward balances are a silent programme failure — track the percentage of issued rewards that expire unredeemed and treat anything above 15% as a catalogue problem
About this report
This insight is part of the Africa HR Insights series by RibiRewards — chart-driven data reports on employee rewards, recognition, and benefits across African markets. Data reflects programme activity, market surveys, and publicly available benchmarks. Published .
Africa HR Insights by RibiRewards · ribirewards.com/insights
More REWARDS insights
The African employee rewards spend report: where the money actually goes
Reward redemption rates by category: what African employees actually claim vs what HR assumes they want
Reward category preferences by generation: Boomers vs Gen X vs Millennials vs Gen Z in Africa
See your own data in RibiRewards
Every chart in this report reflects real programme data. Book a demo to see what your recognition and rewards metrics look like.
Book a demo