…a new organisation! ASK AFRICA is one of the continent’s leading data insights companies, providing consumer insights, brand analytics, and customer experience benchmarking to businesses and institutions across diverse African markets. Established in 1995 and headquartered in Pretoria with an additional office in Cape Town, the company has grown into one of Africa’s largest independent research firms, with fieldwork capabilities across more than 38 African markets. ASK AFRICA is globally certified by Esomar, serving clients across sectors, including banking, telecommunications, retail, healthcare, automotive, consumer packaged goods, development and social impact.
ASK AFRICA is best known for a suite of industry benchmarks built on large-scale, methodologically consistent data collection. Its flagship is the ASK AFRICA Orange Index, South Africa’s longest-running, independently audited customer experience benchmark, which has tracked service satisfaction, emotional connection, and brand loyalty across more than 200 brands and two dozen-plus industries since 2001. This sits alongside the Target Group Index (TGI), a consumer profiling tool covering more than 8,000 brands and used by the majority of South Africa’s top advertisers and media owners for measuring psychographics, media habits, and purchasing behaviour.
Its core services span brand health tracking, customer experience and loyalty research, social and public-sector research, and tailored research solutions designed for organisations of varying size and need. ASK AFRICA describes itself as guided by the belief that research should be done for the greater good, aiming to help organisations identify opportunities for sustainable growth while also surfacing insight into broader societal shifts, including changing levels of consumer trust, the effects of economic pressure on loyalty, and the move toward more digitally mediated service experiences. The company is also explicit that research models cannot simply be copied from global contexts onto African markets, but need to be designed around local realities.
For the Africa Evidence Network (AEN), ASK AFRICA is a useful example of how rigorous, large-scale data collection and benchmarking can generate evidence that is directly usable by decision-makers, whether in the private sector, the public sector, or civil society. Its long-running, methodologically consistent benchmarks, sustained for over two decades in the case of the ASK AFRICA Orange Index, demonstrate the value of longitudinal data for tracking how attitudes, expectations, and behaviours shift over time, including through major disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
For AEN members, ASK AFRICA illustrates how evidence generation and evidence use can be commercially sustained at scale across multiple African markets, and how methodological consistency over time strengthens the credibility and usability of evidence for tracking change. It also offers a useful counterpoint to public-sector and donor-funded evidence models, showing how market research infrastructure built for business decision-making can simultaneously surface insights relevant to broader questions of trust, service delivery, and social wellbeing across the continent.
