6 Best B2B Data Providers for Africa in 2026

A B2B data provider for Africa sells business contacts located in African markets, deep enough in South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya to build a real list. Sales teams, agencies and data engineers who sell into Africa need one. Most global vendors do not say how much of Africa they hold.

Only two of the six below print a figure for the continent: Lusha and ZoomInfo. People Data Labs prints country counts. Apollo and Cognism print none. Free counts settle the rest.

This page ranks six providers on African coverage alone, with list prices checked in September 2026. Read each rival on its own page: Lusha, ZoomInfo, Apollo, People Data Labs and Cognism. Also see best B2B databases, best B2B data providers for the UK and best B2B data providers.

TL;DR

"1M records" means 1M work-email lookups that return a result, at list price.

What we evaluated

• Published Africa coverage: a figure for the continent or by country, with a source we can link.
• Free coverage test: whether you can size an African audience, or test your own list, before you pay.
• Email and phone depth: whether the figure counts contacts with a usable email or only profiles.
• API and MCP: whether an agent or script can pull African records directly.
• Price at volume: flat, credits, seats or quote, and the cost of 1M records.

We ran our own count on LeadOcean. We did not run any query on the rivals, so we print no hit rates for them. Vendor figures are vendor claims, and each vendor counts "contacts" its own way.

How to run the coverage test

Take 25 contacts you really sell to in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt. Use your own list, not ours. Run them through each free tier below and count how many return a work email. Do the same for phones.

Free tiers are enough for this: Lusha Free gives 40 credits a month, Apollo Free 75, ZoomInfo GTM AI 1,000 data credits and LeadOcean 1,000 records for life.

1. LeadOcean: best for API and agent buyers

LeadOcean holds 693M people and 67M companies. It has a continent filter and a country filter with 254 codes. We ran count_leads on 2026-10-01, which spends no records. Africa returns 23,831,669 people across all email statuses. 6,841,185 of them have an email of any status, and 1,807,615 have a verified or catch-all email.

By country, the same count gives 5,129,942 people in South Africa and 3,578,272 in Nigeria. Egypt has 2,670,071, Kenya 1,655,552, Morocco 1,641,317 and Ghana 950,127. 750,823 people in Africa have a phone number. 95,290 mailable people in Africa are C-Team.

The size of Africa is the weak point: phones are about 3% of the African people count, so plan on email first. Lusha prints a larger raw figure, but counts "contacts" a different way. The REST call below sizes an audience for free, with count=true as a query parameter.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true&limit=1" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"country": ["KE"], "jobLevel": ["C-Team"], "hasEmail": true}'

That count is people with an email of any status, not a mailable count. Add emailStatus to narrow it. The MCP server at https://api.leadocean.io/mcp exposes 13 tools, including the free count_leads, and signs in with OAuth 2.1.

Pros

• A free, exact count for any African country, with email status and phone filters.
• Agency is $497 a month flat, with 200 requests a second, 5 keys and no credit meter.
• REST and MCP on every plan, including Free.
• Search by country, city, title, seniority and industry in one call.

Cons

• No rep workspace, sequencer, dialer or CRM.
• Phones are thin in Africa (750,823 people), and v2 contact lookups cost a record even on a miss.
• Free is 1,000 records for life with no bulk CSV export, so a large pull needs Solo or Agency.

Best for: engineers, agencies and agents that sell into Africa at volume and want a fixed bill.

Pricing: Free is 1,000 records for life, no card. Solo is $97 a month, Agency $497 and Platform $1,997 (LeadOcean pricing, October 2026).

2. Lusha: best for the biggest African table

Lusha prints the biggest African number here: 29.6M+ contacts across 59 African countries and territories (Lusha data page, September 2026). South Africa shows 6.9M+, Nigeria 4.1M+, Egypt 3.8M+, Kenya 2.1M+, Morocco 1.9M+ and Ghana 1M+.

Those are contact counts, not mailable counts, and Lusha does not say how many hold an email or a phone. An email costs 1 credit and a phone 5 (Lusha API docs, September 2026). The MCP server has 50 tools and shares the API credit pool (Lusha MCP docs, September 2026).

Africa coverage test. Lusha Free gives 40 credits a month, so you can look up 25 African contacts and read the hit rate yourself. Search through the API is capped at 100 requests a day on Free.

Pros

• The largest published African count, with a table for 59 countries.
• Every plan includes an API key, Free included.
• MCP server with 50 tools.

Cons

• Credits end at a small plan: Premium tops out at 10,000 a month, and 1M work emails by bulk API is 1,040,000 credits.
• No public 1M price, and Scale is custom.
• No published split of email and phone for Africa.

Best for: teams that want the widest African contact table and work in small batches.

Pricing: Free $0 for 40 credits a month. Starter $49.90 a month ($37.45 billed yearly). Pro $69.90 ($52.45). Premium $399.90 ($299.95) (Lusha pricing, September 2026).

3. ZoomInfo: best for African mobile numbers

ZoomInfo is the only provider here that lists African mobiles: 824K+ companies, 18.1M+ contacts and 2.8M+ mobile numbers (ZoomInfo data page, September 2026). Africa is a separate row on that page, next to Europe, Asia and South America.

Its pay-as-you-go product, GTM AI, sells data credits from $20. A credit costs $0.45 at 100 credits and $0.25 at 100,000. Search and lookup are free, and a record is charged once per 12 months (GTM AI pricing, September 2026; GTM AI docs, September 2026).

Africa coverage test. GTM AI Free includes 1,000 data credits, no card. Because search is free, run your African filters first and spend credits only on rows you keep. ZoomInfo has an official MCP server that works with Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor (GTM AI docs, September 2026).

Pros

• Published African figures for companies, contacts and mobiles.
• Free search, with a record charged once a year.
• Official MCP server and a free tier with API access.

Cons

• The public slider stops at 100,000 credits, so 1M is an Enterprise talk.
• Platform plan prices are not public in our read.
• 2.8M mobiles is a small share of 18.1M contacts.

Best for: teams that need African mobile numbers and accept a sales call at volume.

Pricing: GTM AI pay as you go from $20, with 1,000 free data credits at signup (GTM AI pricing, September 2026).

4. Apollo: best for reps who also need sequences and a dialer

Apollo prints no African figure that we could find. Its phone database page lists 240M contacts and 30M companies worldwide, with no regional split (Apollo, September 2026). You can measure Africa yourself, because Apollo's people search costs 0 credits and returns a total_entries count (Apollo API docs, September 2026).

Filter with person_locations[] by country. The search shows at most 50,000 records, 100 a page. An email costs 1 credit and a phone 8, and credits are per seat (Apollo API pricing, September 2026).

Africa coverage test. Apollo Free gives 75 credits a month and an API key. Search South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya by country, read total_entries, then spend credits on your own 25 contacts. The MCP server is at mcp.apollo.io and works on any plan (Apollo MCP docs, September 2026).

Pros

• Free, countable search with person_locations[].
• Sequences, dialer and rep workspace in one product.
• Official MCP server on every plan, Free included.

Cons

• No published African figure, so the first number comes from your own test.
• A phone costs 8 credits, and 1M emails needs about 250 seats.
• Credits expire each billing cycle and do not roll over.

Best for: sales reps who want African search and outreach in one workspace.

Pricing: Basic $65 per seat a month ($49 billed yearly), Professional $99 ($79), Organization $149 ($119, three seats minimum) (Apollo pricing, September 2026).

5. People Data Labs: best for licensed datasets with country counts

People Data Labs (PDL) publishes a table of records by country for its resume dataset. It lists 10,823,004 for South Africa, 6,914,864 for Nigeria, 6,181,119 for Egypt, 3,695,048 for Morocco, 3,456,263 for Kenya and 1,927,481 for Ghana (PDL country stats, September 2026). PDL warns that the table has duplicates.

These are profiles, not mailable contacts. Globally, 592,376,573 of 2,466,510,427 profiles carry an email, about 24% (PDL dataset stats, September 2026). Expect the African email share to be a fraction of the country totals.

Africa coverage test. PDL Free gives up to 100 credits a month, but contact data is obscured. Use it to test match rate on your 25 contacts, not emails. Person Search allows 10 requests a minute, and each record returned is one credit (PDL usage limits, September 2026).

Pros

• Country-level counts for every African market listed.
• Dataset licences for your own warehouse.
• Enrichment allows 1,000 calls a minute on paid plans.

Cons

• Country counts are profiles, with duplicates, not contacts with emails.
• No official MCP server in its docs index (PDL docs, September 2026).
• Above 100,000 records you go to an Enterprise quote.

Best for: teams that license African profiles into a warehouse and handle email finding elsewhere.

Pricing: Free up to 100 credits a month. Pro from $98 a month for 350 credits, or $78 a month billed yearly (PDL pricing, September 2026).

6. Cognism: best for Europe-first teams with a small Africa list

Cognism publishes no African figure. Its EMEA page names the UK, DACH, Benelux, the Nordics, France and Spain, and says nothing about African countries (Cognism EMEA data, September 2026). Treat Africa as untested until you see a sample.

The pricing page lists Standard and Pro with tailored pricing and no dollar figure (Cognism pricing, September 2026). One credit reveals one contact. The API allows 500 requests a minute per operation (Cognism docs, September 2026).

Africa coverage test. Ask sales to run your 25 African contacts before you sign, and ask for the hit rate per country. The MCP server has 15 tools for search, count and dictionary lookups (Cognism docs, September 2026).

Pros

• Deep European coverage if Africa is a small part of the plan.
• API and MCP server on the same credits.
• A revealed contact is not charged again unless the person changes jobs.

Cons

• No African figure and no African country named.
• No public price at any volume, so 1M cannot be priced.
• API and MCP need a package that includes them.

Best for: EMEA sales teams that sell mostly in Europe and want a few African accounts.

Pricing: No public price. Standard and Pro are quote only (Cognism pricing, September 2026).

Comparison table

How to choose

• You pull Africa through an API or an agent: pick LeadOcean. A free count per country, email status filters and Agency at $497 a month flat fit volume work.
• You want the widest African contact table: pick Lusha, then test your own 25 contacts for email hits.
• You need mobile numbers for African accounts: pick ZoomInfo, the only one here that prints an African mobile figure.
• Your reps need a workspace and Africa is one region: pick Apollo, and read total_entries for your countries first.
• You license profiles into a warehouse: pick People Data Labs and find emails with another source.
• Europe is the plan and Africa is a side list: pick Cognism, and demand a sample before you sign.

Verdict

LeadOcean wins for API, agent and volume buyers, because it is the only one here that gives a free, exact African count by country with email and phone filters, at $497 a month flat on Agency. Lusha wins on the largest published African contact table, ZoomInfo on published African mobile numbers, and Apollo for reps who want search and outreach in one workspace. People Data Labs wins for licensed profiles and Cognism for Europe-first teams. Run the 25-contact test before you pay anyone, LeadOcean included.

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