Chapter 2 discusses the latest trends in non-tax revenues as well as the evolution of non-tax revenues over the past decade across 37 African countries. The chapter examines the level and structure of non-tax revenues for individual countries and on average across the continent. It includes in-depth analysis of revenues from extractive industries and a comparison of non-tax revenues in African countries, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Revenue Statistics in Africa 2025
Commonalities and Specificities across African Revenue Classifications
Abstract
A complete picture of public finances requires statistics that go beyond taxation, especially for many African countries that obtain substantial revenues in the form of grants or royalties from oil and minerals. Revenue Statistics in Africa collects statistics on both tax and non-tax revenues, non-tax revenues being government revenues that do not meet the OECD definition of taxation.1 Although there are some important methodological differences between tax and non-tax revenues, they need to be included in any accounting of a country’s total financial resources.2 This chapter provides cross-country comparisons of non-tax revenues for the countries in this publication.
The main categories of non-tax revenues reported here are:3
grants from foreign governments or international organisations (budget aid, food aid, capital transfers, current transfers, project grants, programme grants, international debt relief, etc.);
rents and royalties (such as oil or mining royalties and telecommunications spectrum fees);
other property income (interest, dividends and other returns on government investment);
sales of goods and services (which include some administrative fees such as passport fees, driver’s licence fees, and some fees for regulatory inspections);
fines and penalties (including fines and penalties due to tax violations);
miscellaneous and unidentified revenues (non-tax revenues that cannot be classified according to the other categories, such as large insurance settlements and large donations made by private citizens or organisations).
Non-tax revenues in Africa in 2023 amounted to 5.9% of GDP on average among the 37 countries reporting this data for this edition of Revenue Statistics in Africa.4 Non-tax revenues ranged from 0.5% of GDP in The Gambia to 33.8% of GDP in Lesotho (Figure 1.1). On average, the amount of non-tax revenues collected in each country was 43% of the amount of tax revenues, or 25.1% of the total tax and non-tax revenues.
Botswana, Lesotho, the Republic of the Congo and Somalia were the only countries for which non-tax revenues were higher than tax revenues in 2023. Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Namibia are net recipients of funds from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) Common Revenue Pool (see Box 1.1), which leads to non-tax revenues being higher and tax revenues being lower than otherwise would be the case. All four net SACU recipients are within the top five African countries in non-tax revenues per capita. Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo are far more oil-rich than any of the other African countries in this report5.
These three countries were all among the top nine recipients of non-tax revenues in Africa. Somalia has relied mostly on grants to fund its government while building its fiscal capacity since the end of a civil war in 2012 (Khan and Khan, 2022[1]). As a result, its non-tax revenues, 5.5% of GDP, mostly grants, was twice as high as its tax revenues (2.9% of GDP) in 2023.
The impact of non-tax revenues on national budgets is not the same as for tax revenues. Tax revenues are unrequited, meaning that although in the aggregate, tax revenues are used to finance government expenditures, individual tax payments are not directly exchanged for a specific good or service. Some non-tax revenues, however, do have a direct impact on expenditures. Revenues from sales of goods and services, for example, cannot be collected without the government providing the goods and services in question, which will be recorded as expenditures. However, adding together tax and non-tax revenues gives a more comprehensive picture of African finances than looking at tax revenues in isolation.
The average sum of total tax and non-tax revenues for African countries was 21.9% of GDP in 2023, ranging from 8.4% of GDP in Somalia to 56.5% of GDP in Lesotho. Lesotho’s unusually high revenues in that year reflected the high volatility of its SACU revenues (see the discussion below on Southern African Customs Union revenues). In the previous year, combined revenues amounted to 44.4% of GDP. The ranking of African countries by total tax and non-tax revenues differs from the ranking of countries according to their tax-to-GDP ratio. For example, in terms of tax-to-GDP ratio alone, Botswana was 23rd and the Republic of the Congo was 32nd out of 38 countries, but they are 8th out of 37 countries and 10th out of 37 countries, respectively, in terms of combined tax and non-tax revenues as a percentage of GDP.
Percentage of GDP
Notes: Tax-to-GDP ratios and non-tax-to-GDP ratios need to be interpreted with caution for some countries due to incomplete data. Non-tax revenue includes sub-national non-tax government revenues for Eswatini, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Africa, the only countries for which such revenues are reported. In 2023, these represented, respectively, 1%, 14%, 5%, 37%, 0.1%, 8% and 16.5% of all non-tax revenue collected for each country. Burkina Faso provided data on tax revenues in 2023 but data on non-tax revenues were not available for this edition. Interpreting the impact of total revenues on national budgets is not the same as for tax revenues, since non-tax revenues are not necessarily unrequited, and can therefore have impacts on expenditures that are not present in tax revenues.
See the country tables in Chapters 5 and 6 for further information. “Africa” refers to the average for the 37 African countries reporting non-tax revenues in this report.
Source: Table 4.1 in Chapter 4 and Table 6.1 in Chapter 6 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD data explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
At 5.9% of GDP in 2023, non-tax revenues were at the same level as in 2022 (Figure 1.2). An increase of 0.6 p.p. of GDP in other non-tax revenues (mostly SACU revenues) was offset by a decline of 0.6 p.p. of GDP in property revenues in 2023. This was a reversal of changes in 2022, when SACU revenues decreased while property revenues increased from the previous year. Between 2013 and 2023, the average level of non-tax revenues across African countries declined 1.2% of GDP, which offset more than 85% of the increase in tax revenues over this period. Total non-tax revenues have remained between 5.5% and 5.9% of GDP since 2017 after declining by 2.1 p.p. between 2013 and 2016.
Total revenues as a share of GDP (tax and non-tax revenues) have been steadily increasing in recent years from a low of 19.6% of GDP in 2016 to 21.9% in 2023, an increase of 2.3.p.p. that was mostly driven by increases in tax revenues. Total revenues are approaching the 10-year high of 22% of GDP reached in 2014, albeit with differences in composition: non-tax revenues were 26.8% of total revenues on average in 2023, compared with 32.5% in 2013. As Revenue Statistics in Africa data shows, non-tax revenues have historically been more volatile than tax revenues, in part due to the variability of oil and mineral prices, the instability of the SACU revenue-sharing formula, and unpredictable changes in grants; a reduction in the proportion of non-tax revenues within the overall revenue mix could therefore lead to more stable public finances.
Percentage of GDP
Note: Africa average is calculated over 37 African countries excluding Burkina Faso, for which data on tax revenues was available, but not non-tax revenues. “Other NTR” in this figure includes all non-tax revenues aside from grants and property income. This includes sales of goods and services, fines and penalties, and miscellaneous and unidentified revenues (including SACU revenues).
Source: Authors’ calculations based on data from (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Figure 1.3 shows the contribution of each major category of non-tax revenues (“NTR”) to total non-tax revenues for each country in 2023. In this figure, other non-tax revenues (“other NTR”) can include sales of goods and services, fines and penalties, or miscellaneous and unidentified revenues, but mostly consists of SACU revenues. In Panel A, revenues are shown as a percentage of GDP; in Panel B, they are shown as a percentage of total non-tax revenues.
Four distinct groups are apparent in the data for 2023:
Eight countries received a majority of their non-tax revenues in the form of grants (Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Togo). On average, these countries received grant revenue equivalent to 3.2% of GDP in 2023. All these countries are classified by the World Bank as low-income countries (World Bank, 2025[3]), and some are relatively reliant on foreign assistance to fund their domestic budgets.
Seven countries received most of their non-tax revenues from rents and royalties (Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Liberia, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo and Zambia). For all these countries aside from Liberia and Zambia, oil and gas royalties provided the majority of non-tax revenues. Rents and royalties in these seven countries amounted to 4.9% of GDP on average.
Note: Data include sub-national government non-tax revenues for Eswatini, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and South Africa. “Africa” refers to the average for the 37 countries reporting non-tax revenues in this report. NTR = “non-tax revenues”.
1. For Rwanda, non-tax revenues aside from grants, fines, penalties and forfeits were not disaggregated in the data and are therefore classified as miscellaneous and unidentified revenues.
2. Interest, dividends, and other property income aside from rents and royalties.
3. All other non-tax revenues not elsewhere specified, including sales of goods and services, fines, penalties and forfeits, SACU revenues, and unidentified revenues.
See the country tables in Chapters 5 and 6 for further information.
Source: Table 6.2 in Chapter 6 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia, the four countries neighbouring South Africa that belong to SACU, received substantial non-tax revenues via transfers from the SACU Common Revenue Pool. On average, these countries collected non-tax revenues outside of grants and property income equivalent to 14.7% of GDP.
Among the remaining 18 countries, there was considerable heterogeneity, with neither grants nor rents and royalties constituting a majority of non-tax revenues. Among these countries, grants were the largest source of non-tax revenues for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Senegal, although they did not constitute more than 50% of revenues. Similarly, rents and royalties were the largest source of non-tax revenues for Mauritania and Tunisia but were less than half of non-tax revenues. For the other countries, the main sources of non-tax revenues included: interest and dividends for Equatorial Guinea, Mali, and Seychelles; sales of goods and services for Cabo Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Mauritius, Morocco and Uganda; fines and penalties for South Africa and miscellaneous and unallocated revenues for Egypt and Kenya.
This section analyses changes in non-tax revenues between 2022 and 2023 by category (Figure 1.4). Although the change in the average ratio of non-tax revenues to GDP across the 37 countries was modest, this was not necessarily the case for individual countries.
Percentage of GDP
Note: The black diamonds correspond to the sum of the percentage point changes in grants, rents and royalties and other non-tax revenues between 2022 and 2023. “Africa” refers to the average for the 37 African countries reporting non-tax revenues in this report. NTR = “non-tax revenues”.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on data from (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
The average absolute change in non-tax revenues between 2022 and 2023 was 1.7% of GDP, compared with 1.1% for tax revenues. Since the increases in some countries were offset by decreases in others, the country-level variance did not translate into a volatile average African non-tax revenue. Half of the average absolute change in non-tax revenues was due to four outlying countries. In Lesotho and Eswatini, non-tax revenues increased strongly as a share of GDP (by 11.2 p.p. and 6.3 p.p. respectively) due to increases in SACU revenues. However, decreases in property income caused sizeable declines in the non-tax revenues of Equatorial Guinea (by 9.6 p.p.) and the Republic of the Congo (by 7.5 p.p.).
Grants
On average, grant revenues for the 37 countries amounted to 1.1% of GDP in 2023. Eighteen countries received grant revenues amounting to less than 0.5% of GDP in 2023 (Figure 1.5), while for five countries, they exceeded 3% of GDP. Most countries receiving grants below 0.5% of GDP in 2023 were middle-income according to the World Bank’s classification based on gross national income (GNI) per capita (World Bank, 2025[3]), with the exceptions of The Gambia, Liberia and Mali, which were low-income countries. Most of the countries receiving grants equivalent to more than 1% of GDP in 2023 were low income, with the exceptions of Cabo Verde, Lesotho, Senegal and Zambia, which were all lower middle income.
Percentage of GDP
Source: Tables 6.2 and 6.3 in Chapter 6 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx. “Africa (37)” refers to the average for the 37 African countries reporting non-tax revenues in this report.
Most countries receiving substantial grant revenues observed a decline in their level as a share of GDP in 2023. Between 2022 and 2023, the largest changes in grant revenues were the decreases of 3% of GDP for Niger and of over 1% of GDP for Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia. Niger’s decline coincided with a coup in 2023 (RFI, 2023[4]) that complicated its efforts to obtain foreign aid. Rwanda has a goal of increasing its tax revenues to reduce its reliance on grants; it has seen its grants as a share of GDP drop from a high of 11.1% in 2010 to 4.6% in 2023 (Minecofin, 2021[5]). Total ODA disbursements6 from all official donors to the African continent in 2023 was 15% lower in real terms compared with its peak in 2020, although its level in 2023 was still higher than in 2019. The decline in foreign aid in 2022 and 2023 coincides with donors turning their attention to humanitarian crisis and conflicts in other regions (OECD, 2024[6]).
Property income
Property income, or the revenues countries collect through their status as owners of property (which includes ownership of public lands and the oil and minerals underneath them as well as ownership of corporations), amounted to 2.4% of GDP for African countries on average in 2023 (Figure 1.6), down from 3.0% in 2022. Equatorial Guinea saw a drop of 9.6 p.p. between 2022 and 2023, while the drop for the Republic of the Congo was 7.3 p.p. The property income for these two countries is almost entirely from petroleum and gas, either collected in the form of royalties or through government stakes in oil and gas companies. Crude oil and natural gas exports in 2023 were equivalent to 38% and 47% of GDP for Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo, respectively. Equatorial Guinea saw a decline of 41% in the US dollar value of its crude oil exports and a decline of 29% in the US dollar value of its natural gas exports between 2022 and 2023. The US dollar value of crude oil exports from the Republic of the Congo dropped by 35% over the same period (CEPII, 2025[7]).
Percentage of GDP
Note: Burkina Faso and Rwanda are excluded as the data are not available. “Africa” refers to the average for the 37 African countries reporting non-tax revenues in this report.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Tables 6.5‑6.37 and Table 4.17 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Rents and royalties are revenues generated from property the government owns, usually by prospecting and extracting non-renewable resources from government land or from harvesting government-owned farms and forests. Interest and dividends are returns on government-owned investments in corporations. Property incomes for African countries were, on average, 57% rents and royalties in 2023 among the 35 countries reporting. For countries collecting property income equivalent to at least 1% of GDP, rents and royalties were on average 70% of all property income.
Most property income in African countries comes from resource extraction. On average, 68% of rents and royalties were from extractive revenues for the 30 countries reporting rents and royalties, and 28% of interest and dividends came from government stakes in corporations involved in resource extraction, of the 22 countries reporting interest and dividends. These revenues will be discussed in more detail in the section on revenues from extractive industries.
In 2023, crude oil exports were over 10% of GDP for five African countries: Chad, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and the Republic of the Congo. These countries are exposed to the dual challenge of variable crude oil prices and uncertainty over the long-term trajectory of oil production. Oil production in Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea has been on a downward trend over the past 10 years, dropping 69.5% and 47.7%, respectively, between 2013 and 2023, with Equatorial Guinea seeing a drop of 27.5% in oil production between 2022 and 20237. Oil production increased slightly in 2023 in the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Chad and Nigeria, but only in Gabon did production increase enough to offset the 16% drop in crude oil prices between 2022 and 2023.
Rents and royalties from sources other than resource extraction in 2023 included water royalties in Lesotho, which amounted to 4.8% of GDP, royalties from the construction of the International Gnassingbé Eyadéma Airport in Togo (USD 5 million, or some 0.06% of GDP), royalties from the Suez Canal in Egypt (USD 477 million, or 0.13% of GDP) and telecom licences in Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania and Somalia. Most interest and dividends come from various kinds of corporations, including public and private companies or public monopolies, or they are unspecified investment income collected by other institutions, such as the interest and dividends collected by social security funds in Seychelles.
Certain countries generate substantial non-tax revenues from the normal operations of government. These can be divided into sales of goods and services, fines and penalties, and miscellaneous and unidentified non-tax revenues. Compiling statistics on these revenues can be challenging, since they are typically collected by agencies other than tax administrations and are often not defined by legislation. They might not even be captured by government budgets. This can therefore lead to underestimates of revenues for institutions and governments that have less taxing authority and are therefore more reliant on non-tax revenues, such as municipal governments.
For all these revenue categories, there may be arguments about the degree to which they are unrequited or compulsory, and therefore whether they are more properly classified as taxes. The question of which administrative fees are taxes and which are not is discussed in Annexes A and B of this report. Fines and penalties on tax violations are sometimes reported as part of tax revenues, which could lead to an under-reporting of total revenues for fines and penalties. Finally, miscellaneous and unidentified revenues are by definition revenues for which little information is available that can be used in order to determine whether or not these constitute taxes or non-tax revenues.
Sales of goods and services and administrative fees
Governments produce goods and services both as a market- and as a non-market participant. As a market participant, governments sometimes provide goods and services that can also be obtained from private companies (such as food or transportation). At the same time, they also provide services in the course of administering programmes and executing laws that are unique to the function of government. Fees charged for these non-market services are generally classified as administrative fees.
Administrative fees are often difficult to classify since they occupy a grey area between payments for services (which are non-tax revenues) and compulsory unrequited payments collected during government operations (which are taxes).8 Court fees and fees for driver’s licences, passports, patent registrations and marriage certificates tend to be classified as non-tax revenues. When administrative fees are classified as taxes, they are typically taxes on financial and capital transactions (for example, taxes on sales of land); taxes on the use of goods and performing activities (for example hunting licences, vehicle registrations); or other taxes (for example, sales of fiscal stamps, where stamps are used to pay for taxes and administrative fees).
Eight countries generated non-tax revenues from sales of goods and services and administrative fees equivalent to at least 1% of GDP in 2023 (Figure 1.7): Cabo Verde (4.2%), Egypt (1.1%), Ghana (1.4%), Mauritius (1%), Morocco (1.1%), Mozambique (1.5%), Seychelles (1.9%) and Somalia (2.2%). Cabo Verde’s high amount of revenues from sales of goods and services is mostly due to service fees, or fees for business registrations and secretarial charges, which, at 8.9% of total revenues, are higher than revenues from corporate taxes.
Percentage of GDP
Note: Figures reported here include sub-national tax revenues for Morocco, Mauritius, Nigeria, Somalia and South Africa, and sub-national non-tax revenues for Eswatini, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, and Somalia, the only countries for which such revenues were reported for 2023. “Africa” refers to the average for the 37 African countries reporting non-tax revenues in this report. Data on revenues from sales of goods and services are missing for Rwanda and Burkina Faso. In Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Uganda, revenues from property taxes are mainly levied by local governments for which data on revenue are not available.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on data from (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
The composition of revenues from sales of goods and services and administrative fees varied by country. In Cabo Verde, 61% of revenues listed under sales of goods and services were fees, and another 38% came from airports and other concessions. In Ghana, all such revenues were reported as either revenues from “Municipalities, Departments and Agencies”, or “Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies”. In Morocco, 44% of revenue from government sales of goods and services were collected at the local level.
Miscellaneous or unidentified revenue
Some notable categories of non-tax revenue do not fit within any of the categories listed above, including:
Capital transfers not included elsewhere;
Voluntary donations to government agencies from individuals or private corporations (not including donations from intergovernmental organisations, which are classified as grants);
Private payments to government made as a result of major court settlements or insurance claims
Yield from budget capping policy;
Contributions from government employees to social and welfare schemes within government;
Payments covering different categories in the classification where a breakdown is not available;
Payments whose proper classification is unknown due to a lack of data. (Rwanda did not disaggregate non-tax revenue outside of grants, fines, penalties, and forfeits, so these were included in this category);
SACU revenues to Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia (see Box 2.1).
Miscellaneous and unidentified revenues are a significant component of non-tax revenues in certain countries. These include exceptional voluntary contributions to the government in Tunisia, capital transfers from special statutory funds in Mauritius and, in Morocco, payments made to the government in exchange for the right to compete with state institutions in the provision of services.
The volatility of miscellaneous and unidentified revenues may be due to large capital transfers, revenue streams that are short-lived or funds that are reclassified as unidentified due to lack of information. The higher values for this category could reflect uncertainty as to the true amount of revenue within other non-tax revenue classifications.
The Southern African Customs Union (SACU) incorporates Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa. Its vision is “an economic community with equitable and sustainable development, dedicated to the welfare of its people for a common future”. Headquartered in Windhoek, Namibia, SACU is the oldest customs union in the world, having been founded in 1899 between the British colony of Cape of Good Hope and the Orange Free State Boer Republic. Subsequent agreements in 1910 and 1969 included Botswana, Eswatini and Lesotho. Following Namibia’s independence in 1990 and the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, new negotiations led to the current SACU agreement, which was signed in 2002.
The SACU agreement provides for free movement of SACU manufactured products within the union, without application of tariffs or duties (however, the products are subject to value added tax within members, to the extent that the specific products are not exempt from VAT within domestic law). It also provides for common external tariffs and for the payment of customs and excise duties into a common pool to be shared between the SACU countries under the revenue-sharing formula set out in the Annex to the agreement. SACU is the only one of the five customs union in Africa for which revenues from such arrangements were reported in Revenue Statistics in Africa.1
In addition to the customs and excise duties collected for the SACU revenue pool, SACU countries are free to levy other specific customs and excise duties. The excise revenues collected by South Africa from its Road Accident Fund, for example, are not included in the Common Revenue Pool. Alcohol and tobacco levies in Botswana are also included in the Common Revenue Pool.
The revenue-sharing agreement includes three components:
A customs component, which divides the gross amount of customs duties according to the value of goods each country imports from other SACU countries in a given year (as a percentage of intra-SACU imports).
An excise component, which divides the gross amount of excise duties according to each country’s GDP as a percentage of SACU’s combined GDP.
A development component, which is funded from 15% of the excise component and is weighted towards less developed SACU countries using a formula based on GDP per capita.
As final estimates of economic conditions can undergo substantial revisions years after the year in question, this can result in adjustments to the calculated value of past SACU payments and changes made to compensate for these overpayments.
In this publication, revenue from excises, tariffs and customs duties are included as tax revenues in the SACU country that collected the revenue. They are included under headings 5121 (Excises) and 5123 (Customs and import duties) in the tax revenue tables. Revenues received from the SACU Common Revenue Pool are included as miscellaneous revenue in the non-tax revenue tables, as seen in Table 6.13 for Eswatini.
In the case of South Africa, where payments exceed the revenue share received from the Pool, the payments net of the share received are recorded as a memorandum item in the non-tax revenue table (Table 6.23).Customs and excise duties are collected by South Africa and are declared as revenues in its budget documents, before a portion of those funds are transferred to the SACU Common Revenue Pool. This means that the revenues reported as excises or customs duties for South Africa include a portion that do not go to the South African government.
1. Two of the eight regional economic communities (RECs) recognised by the African Union are customs unions: the East African Community (EAC) and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The other customs unions are Central African Economic And Monetary Community (CEMAC), West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU.
Source: (SACU, 2017[8]), (SACU, 2014[9]).
Southern African Customs Union revenues
All five members of SACU collect customs and excise taxes under a unified tax regime and then transfer those funds to the SACU Common Revenue Pool. The SACU Common Revenue Pool in turn redistributes the tax money collected according to a revenue-sharing formula. South Africa possesses the main ports of entry into Southern Africa and ends up collecting almost all the customs duties and excises allocated to the SACU Common Revenue Pool. South Africa therefore makes net payments into the SACU Revenue Pool while the other SACU countries are net recipients.
These payments are substantial and tend to be volatile, due to the small size of the economies of Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Namibia compared with South Africa, and due to the fact that unexpected economic shocks, such as the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to a divergence between economic forecasts used to calculate SACU payments, and actual economic conditions, leading to major corrective adjustments to SACU payments. In response to the volatility of SACU payments, Eswatini established a Revenue Stabilisation Fund (RSF) in 2023 to reduce the impact of this annual variance on its budgets. In 2023, Eswatini put funds equivalent to 0.8% of its GDP in the RSF during the 2023/24 fiscal year.
In 2023, post-pandemic adjustments in SACU payments continued. Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia all received substantial increases in SACU payments, a year after all of them received major decreases (Figure 1.8). These revenues amounted to 9.2%, 13.0%, 26.2% and 10.5% of GDP, respectively, in Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia. In all four of these countries, these SACU-to-GDP ratios were over 50% higher than in the previous year, and in the case of Lesotho, nearly double the previous year’s revenue (24.5% of GDP compared with 14.0% in 2022). The sharp increase in 2023 came after stronger-than-expected growth in SACU countries, and higher customs revenues. Despite the high increase in 2023, SACU payments may be reverting to long-term trends. In Botswana, Eswatini, and Lesotho, SACU revenues were close to their level in 2020, and in Namibia, they matched the level in 2019.
Note: SACU revenues reported here are classified as non-tax revenues for all countries presented here except for South Africa. For South Africa, excise taxes and customs duties that are included within the SACU revenue-sharing agreement are reported as “SACU-related” revenues, while South African excises and customs duties not included within the revenue-sharing agreement are reported as “Other CT” (abbreviation of “Other consumption taxes”) and are not counted as “SACU revenue”. These correspond to the annual disbursements by country from the SACU Common Revenue Pool.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on data from (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Revenue Statistics in Africa seeks to distinguish between national revenues coming from the extraction of natural resources (referred to as extractive-related revenues) and other forms of revenue. Revenues from extractive industries, which include oil, gas, and minerals, are dependent on highly variable commodity prices which are set globally and can therefore be an external source of unforeseeable risks to government budgets.
In addition, the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources like oil, gas, and minerals represents a depletion of national wealth, and therefore brings up the issue of opportunity costs when it comes to under-selling, or under-monetising these resources by national governments. For these reasons, an analysis of resource-related revenues, and if possible, a distinction between renewable and non-renewable resource-related revenues, is important to the analysis of revenue policy in African countries.
The detailed country-specific revenue categories provided in the Revenue Statistics in Africa data permits an identification of many of the national revenues that can be attributed to extractive industries in certain countries. For example, Ghana’s “Income/profit tax on oil companies” can be identified as an extractive-related revenue (see Table 5.14. in Chapter 5), as can “Revenue from oil” reported under “rents and royalties” for Nigeria (Table 6.31. in Chapter 6). Using this methodology, for each category of revenue, the total amount of revenue that is explicitly reported as extractive-related can be estimated.
This methodology may undercount revenues from the extractive industry since the distinction between extractive and non-extractive revenues is not always made in Revenue Statistics in Africa data. For this reason, efforts to introduce this distinction in more revenue categories and for more countries are ongoing. Potentially compounding the risk of undercounting, this methodology does not factor in the indirect impacts of extractive industries on public revenues. In some countries, extractive industries such as petroleum and minerals have a significant impact on growth across the economy. This industry could therefore have an impact on all forms of tax and non-tax revenues, including, for example, VAT revenues that can be boosted by macro-economic spillovers from the mining sector, or higher corporate taxes on hotels that have seen increased business from mining corporations.
Figure 1.9 shows the reported extractive-related revenues identified using the methodology above for different revenue streams. Panel A shows for each type of revenue, the percentage of revenue collected for each African country reported as coming from extractive industries. Panel B shows for each revenue category, total extractive-related revenues collected as a percentage of GDP. As explained in Box 1.2, African governments have different strategies for capturing natural resource wealth, and this is shown here by the number of different types of revenues that are reported as extractive-related.
There are various mechanisms1 by which natural resources generate revenues or savings for government. Rents and royalties are the most direct means of deriving revenue from natural resource wealth. The government charges fees to companies and individuals in exchange for the right to access government lands. It does this in its capacity as landowner and these fees are generally decided through negotiation. These are recorded under property income.
Payment for services provided by the government is another source of non-tax revenue paid for by businesses in the primary sector. This can include, for example, payments for environmental inspections or for the construction of infrastructure, or, in the case of Mauritius, payment for weather data and maps. These are recorded under sales of goods and services.
Public ownership (full or partial) of a corporation that exploits natural resources on the government’s behalf results in government revenues in the form of profits and dividends. These are recorded under property income. For example, the revenues collected by the government of Botswana from dividends it receives from its 50% stake in Debswana, the company that operates the main diamond mines in Botswana, are recorded under property income (DeBeers, 2025[10]).
Taxes targeting natural resource exploitation could be introduced, such as an excise tax on the sale of materials extracted from public lands or a tax on mining that targets the activity, rather than the individual or company exploiting natural resources. These, too, will be recorded as taxes. Such taxes on mining exist in Niger and Senegal, which impose taxes on mining activities that are classified in Revenue Statistics under other taxes on goods and services.
Companies and individuals exploiting natural resources are generally subject to the same taxes (such as income taxes and value-added taxes) as other economic entities. Revenues from these general taxes will be included in government financial statements but not necessarily attributed to sectors exploiting natural resources.
Companies and individuals may use some of the wealth they obtain from natural resource extraction to build infrastructure or provide services, sometimes as a condition for accessing publicly-owned natural resources. Where this satisfies demand for public investment or services, it could result in savings on government expenditure, but it would not be recorded as revenue. For example, in Guinea, a railway line connecting the Simandou iron ore mine to the port of Morebaya is being built by Rio Tinto, the Winning Consortium Group and la Compagnie du TransGuinéen (a public corporation) (Klein, 2024[11]).
1. Note that taxes on oil extraction can include corporate income tax, excise taxes on energy products, un-refunded sales taxes such as VATs and non-tax revenue can include royalties, profit sharing, dividends received from state enterprises, and other investment income received from government direct participation in extractive enterprises (Mansour and Rota-Graziosi, 2013[21]).
The data for Latin America and the Caribbean only represents central government revenues, whereas for Africa, local and regional government revenues are also included in the total. On average, African central government revenues represent 99% of all non-tax revenues.
Most of the revenues explicitly identified as extractive-related in the Revenue Statistics in Africa data are concentrated in a few revenue categories. The categories for which more than 10% of revenues comes from extractive industries are corporate income taxes, mining taxes (classified as other taxes on specific goods and services), export taxes, rents and royalties, and interest and dividends. On average, 66% of rents and royalties were extractive-related, the only revenue category for which this was a majority.
Extractive-related revenues amounted to 2.6% of GDP on average across the 37 African countries in 2023, of which 95% came from three categories of revenues: corporate income tax, rents and royalties, and interest and dividends amounted to 2.5% of GDP on average among African countries in 2023, which corresponds to 95% of the total extractive-related revenues. It is possible, however, that within these three categories, extractive-related revenues are more often reported separately from other revenues than is the case in other revenue categories.
Note: These revenues include only tax and non-tax revenues that are clearly labelled as coming from minerals, oil or gas extraction within the Revenue Statistics in Africa datasets. These averages are calculated over 37 African countries, excluding Burkina Faso. Countries vary in the level of detail of reported data, so low levels of reported extractive-related revenues could be a reflection of there not being enough information available to determine if revenues are extractive-related or not. For Cabo Verde, Eswatini, The Gambia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Morocco, Rwanda and Seychelles, no revenues could be identified as being extractive-related. Some taxes on mining are classified are classified as taxes on goods and services, when they can be applied to mining companies who own the land that they are mining, and are classified in a separate category from VATs, excises, and taxes on international trade in the Revenue Statistics in Africa classification.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Tables 5.1-5.38 and 6.5‑6.42 and Table 4.17 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Most extractive-related tax revenues come from corporate taxes on oil companies. Extractive-related revenues were more likely to be identified within income taxes than consumption taxes. It is more administratively straightforward to distinguish between extractive and non-extractive companies within corporate taxation since these taxes are collected at the level of corporations. Identifying extractive-related VAT or other consumption revenues requires linking each transaction to the entity making the purchase. However, some consumption taxes could be identified as extractive-related if they are levied on the products of resource extraction. Some countries levy taxes on exports of extracted commodities, for example, to recapture some of the natural resource value at the point where it leaves the country. For example, Guinea has a mining exit tax, which is classified as taxes on exports in the OECD classification.
Percentage of GDP
Note: The Africa average is calculated over 36 African countries, excluding Burkina Faso and Rwanda for which not enough information is available to determine if revenues are extractive related for both tax and non-tax revenues. These revenues include only tax and non-tax revenues that are clearly labelled as coming from mining, oil and gas extraction within the Revenue Statistics in Africa datasets. This does not cover all tax and non-tax coming from resource extractions. Cabo Verde, Eswatini, The Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, and Seychelles reported no revenues that could be identified as coming from companies involved in resource extraction.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Tables 5.1-5.33 and 6.5‑6.38 and Table 4.17 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
In Figure 2.10, tax and non-tax revenues that have been explicitly identified as being extractive-related within the Revenue Statistics in Africa datasets are shown for each country. The countries with the highest resource revenues as a percentage of GDP are, as expected, resource-rich countries. Among the countries with extractive-related revenues above 2% of GDP, oil and gas made up the majority of the exports of Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria and the Republic of the Congo in 2023. On the other hand, diamonds made up over 80% of Botswana’s exports in 2023, the Democratic Republic of the Congo mostly exported copper, and Namibia exported gold, diamonds and uranium. Most African countries, however, did not report much public revenue from natural resources. On average, among the 36 African countries for which it was possible to make an estimate, extractive-related revenues were 2.6% of GDP, of which 62% was non-tax revenues.
Percentage of GDP
Note: The Africa average is calculated over 36 African countries, excluding Burkina Faso and Rwanda for which not enough information is available to determine if revenues are extractive related for both tax and non-tax revenues. These revenues include only tax and non-tax revenues that are clearly labelled as coming from mining, oil or gas extraction within the Revenue Statistics in Africa datasets. This does not cover all tax revenue coming from resource extraction. Cabo Verde, Eswatini, The Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco and Seychelles reported no tax or non-tax revenues that could be identified as coming from companies involved in resource extraction.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Tables 5.1-5.33 and 6.5‑6.38 and Table 4.17 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Figure 2.11 shows the same extractive-related revenues broken down by the associated resources. Oil revenues are shown to have the largest impact on public revenues, accounting for most of the extractive-related revenues for the five countries collecting the most extractive revenues. Equatorial Guinea’s oil and gas revenues come in the form of corporate taxes on oil companies (45%), gas monetisation, or state revenues from revenue-sharing agreements with companies exploiting gas reserves (17%), oil dividends (10%), and shareholder participation in oil revenues (5%), but the different sources of oil and gas revenue for Equatorial Guinea have changed drastically in recent years. Gas monetisation was first reported only in 2022. Extractive revenues for the Republic of the Congo come mostly from revenues from the Société nationale des pétroles du Congo (SNPC), a national oil company. The SNPC is a part-shareholder in all private oil and gas ventures in the country, as well as having full ownership of some oil projects (EY/CNC, 2022[12]). The revenues associated with the SNPC are classified as rents and royalties in this publication but actually constitute a mix of different revenue streams and occupy the conceptual boundaries between resource rents and investment income.
In the past decade and a half, total exports of crude oil in US dollars among the countries in the publication has been on a downward trend, while exports of raw metals has been increasing (Figure 1.12). A small spike in the value of exports of crude oil in 2022 aligns with the 41% increase in crude oil prices between 2022 and 2023, which was followed by a decrease of 16% in 2023 (World Bank, 2025[13]). A global shift away from fossil fuels could accelerate this trend, driving up demand for minerals that are essential to renewable energies. However, the shift in the extractive sector could have a drastically different impact on public finances.
Oil production is highly profitable, and governments can generally capture a large proportion of the value of its production, but that has not generally been the case with minerals extraction. With future revaluations of existing mineral resources, and the development of new mines, governments and policy analysts are finding strategies to ensure that such wealth can be exploited in a fashion that will be financially beneficial to countries for which they are responsible (see (OECD, 2020[14]; OECD, 2019[15]). While African countries are gradually amplifying their mineral exports, generating significant revenues from these remains a challenge (World Bank, 2023[16]). This situation emphasises the imperative for African countries to fortify their strategies for tapping into the revenue potential of diverse mineral resources.
Source: Authors’ calculations from detailed Revenue Statistics in Africa data for Panel A, and for panel B, data from BACI International Trade Database at the Product-Level from (CEPII, 2025[7]).
Percentage of total non-tax revenues
Note: The Africa average is calculated over 36 African countries, excluding Burkina Faso and Rwanda for which not enough information is available to determine if revenues are extractive related for both tax and non-tax revenues. These revenues include only non-tax revenues that are clearly labelled as coming from oil, gas or mineral extraction within the Revenue Statistics in Africa datasets. This does not cover all non-tax revenue coming from resource extractions. Cabo Verde, Eswatini, The Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Senegal, Seychelles and Zambia reported no non-tax revenues that could be identified as coming from companies involved in resource extraction. NTR = “non-tax revenues.”
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Tables 5.1-5.33 and 6.5‑6.38 and Table 4.17 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
For eight African countries, the bulk of non-tax revenues comes from extractive-related revenues (Figure 2.13). They constitute over 90% of non-tax revenues for Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria and the Republic of the Congo. Extractive-related non-tax revenues take the form of rents and royalties or interest and dividends, with all other forms of non-tax revenues generally negligible, aside from some fines and penalties on mining companies reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rents and royalties were the vast majority of extractive-related non-tax revenues for all African countries except Botswana and Equatorial Guinea, with Ghanaian non-tax extractive-revenues evenly divided (in broad terms) between rents and royalties, and interest and dividends.
Percentage of total tax revenues
Note: The Africa average is calculated over 36 African countries, excluding Burkina Faso and Rwanda for which not enough information is available to determine if revenues are extractive related for both tax and non-tax revenues. These revenues include only tax revenues that are clearly labelled as coming from oil, gas or mineral extraction within the Revenue Statistics in Africa datasets. This does not cover all tax revenue coming from resource extractions. Botswana, Cabo Verde, the Republic of the Congo, Eswatini, The Gambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Seychelles, Somalia, Togo, Tunisia and Uganda reported no tax revenues that could be identified as coming from companies involved in resource extraction. PIT = “personal income tax”; CIT = “corporate income tax”; VAT = “Value-added tax”.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on Tables 5.1-5.33 and 6.5‑6.38 and Table 4.17 and (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Revenue Statistics in Asia and the Pacific collects data on non-tax revenue using the same concepts and methodologies as are used in Revenue Statistics in Africa, while Revenue Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean initiative did likewise for the 2025 edition. This allows for comparison of non-tax revenues between these regions. The coverage of this data remains incomplete, however. Twenty-three out of 37 Asia-Pacific economies reported non-tax revenues to the 2025 edition of Revenue Statistics in Asia and the Pacific (OECD, 2025[17]), while non-tax revenue data was available for 22 of 27 countries included in Revenue Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean9 (OECD et al., 2025[18]).
Figure 2.14 shows the ratio of non-tax revenues to total combined tax and non-tax revenues in 2023 for the 82 countries for which this data is available. African countries within this sample collected 25.1% of their revenues in the form of non-tax revenues on average, which corresponded to 5.9% of GDP, while for Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, non-tax revenues were 12.8% of total revenues on average, or 3.2% of GDP. Of the nine countries where non-tax revenues amounted to less than 5% of total revenues in 2023, seven were in LAC and two were in Africa. Among the nine countries for which non-tax revenue exceeded tax revenue in 2023, five were from Asia or the Pacific and four were from Africa.
Percentage of all revenues
Source: Authors’ calculations based on data collected for the Revenue Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean 2025, (OECD et al., 2025[18]), https://doi.org/10.1787/7594fbdd-en, Revenue Statistics in Asia and the Pacific 2025, (OECD, 2025[17]), https://doi.org/10.1787/6c04402f-en, as well as from Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]) http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
Figure 1.16 shows the average non-tax revenues as a percentage of GDP for Africa, the LAC region, and for Asia and the Pacific, excluding five Pacific Island economies (Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue and Tokelau) with non-tax revenues amounting to over 50% of GDP. Average non-tax revenues for the African and Asia-Pacific economies as a percentage of GDP were similar (5.9% for Africa and 5.8% for Asia‑Pacific) but nearly twice the level of LAC countries (3.2%). Most African countries (30 of 37) and Asia-Pacific economies (10 out of 18) are low or lower middle income; whereas most LAC countries (19 of 22) are upper-middle or high income countries. Upper-middle and high income countries do not tend to report significant grant revenues, which represent the main difference between the LAC average and the Africa and Asia-Pacific averages.
Source: Authors’ calculations based data collected by the OECD Development Centre and the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration from the governments of countries and economies, as well as from (OECD/ATAF/AUC, 2025[2]), “Revenue Statistics in Africa - Comparative tax and non-tax revenues”, OECD Data Explorer, http://data-explorer.oecd.org/s/dx.
References
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← 1. Please see the Interpretative Guide to non-tax revenue in Annex B of this report for the definitions of these revenue categories.
← 2. Several methodological issues are present in non-tax revenues which do not necessarily arise in tax statistics. Some revenues, such as administrative fees, might be used as cost-recovery mechanisms and subtracted from cost figures rather than reported as revenues. This could be the case for local governments or other public institutions for which data only exists on net transfers of funds to the central government. If sales of goods and services are reported without deduction of costs, this could overstate a government’s revenues. Grants, legal settlements and mining and oil contracts involve large payments by external entities such as multinational corporations and foreign governments who may be subject to different national oversight mechanisms. Some resource-rich countries may negotiate large payments from resource extraction payments as a lump sum that bundles together many categories of both tax and non-tax revenue, making detailed breakdowns less feasible. Finally, non-tax revenues are often under the responsibility of different authorities than tax revenues, and sometimes there is not necessarily a separation made between revenues and expenses, so these revenues might not necessarily follow the same reporting standard. Please see Annex B for more details on the methodology used for non-tax revenues.
← 3. Please see also Annex B.
← 4. Burkina Faso provided data on tax revenues in 2025 but data on non-tax revenues were not available for this edition.
← 5. Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo all produced over 20 MWh of oil per capita in 2023, putting them in the top 20 largest per capita oil producers in the world in 2023, and making them far more oil-rich than any other of the other African countries in this report, all of whom produced less than 4 MW/h of oil per capita in 2023 (Our World in Data, 2025[19]; UN, 2024[20]).
← 6. ODA not only covers flows captured under “grants” in this publication (budget aid, food aid, capital transfers, current transfers, project grants, programme grants, international debt relief, etc.), but also encompasses concessional loans, in-kind technical assistance, in-donor administrative costs and in-donor refugee costs, as well as other activities that do not generate a (net) revenue flow to the country. The volume of ODA provided by a donor to a given country will thus be different from – and often higher than – the volume of grants reported by that country in Revenue Statistics in Africa.
← 7. Nigeria’s oil industry has been hampered by security threats over the past few years (Akindoyo, 2025[22]).
← 8. See paragraphs 9‑13 of the OECD Interpretative Guide in Annex A for an explanation of how administrative fees are classified in this publication.
← 9. The data for Latin America and the Caribbean only represents central government revenues, whereas for Africa, local and regional government revenues are also included in the total. On average, African central government revenues represent 99% of all non-tax revenues.