Poor Scores for Postal Services in Africa, Latin America

This article is published in collaboration with Statista

by Katharina Buchholz

African and Latin American countries receive poor grades for their postal services, failing especially in the metric that measures whether services offered are relevant to customers. Many African nations are also far behind when it comes to reach and reliability, a newly released report by the International Postal Union has found.

Asia boasts some better postal services in developing countries, for example in Thailand, Malaysia and China. The latter country was rated as having the 10th best postal service in the world by the report after climbing 15 ranks. Switzerland was once again named as the world's best postal service ahead of Germany, Austria and Japan.

The report also find that postal services support almost 7 percent of global GDP. While demand for letters and similar mailings has been decreasing for many years, parcel volume has been climbing up fast, creating big income opportunities but also high competition with private logistics companies. These new developments pose ever more complex challenges for postal services that would require massive investments in some parts of the world to achieve. Overall, the report measures progress in the world of postal services globally. While the median postal service received a score of 30 out of 100 in 2021, this was up to 31.8 in 2022. The best postal service in Sub-Saharan Africa was that of Ethiopia, while Morocco had the best among Arab countries. Brazil won best postal service in Latin America.

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