Afghanistan

Economy & income

Currency

• Afghan afghani (AFN, ؋)
• ~66–67 per USD (Jul 2026, Trading Economics)
• NOTE: despite the crisis, the afghani was one of the world's best-performing currencies in 2023–24 — the Taliban central bank props it up with tight FX controls, a ban on dollar/online trading, and large aid-dollar + remittance inflows

GDP per capita

• ~$448 nominal (2025, IMF WEO; up from ~$418 in 2024) — among the lowest on earth
• ~$2,304 PPP (2025, IMF)
• Total GDP ~$19.7bn nominal (2025, IMF)
• Per-capita GDP actually fell ~5.6% in 2025 (World Bank) as 2M+ returnees from Iran/Pakistan swelled the population faster than output grew

Average salary

• ~$450–475 net/mo as an aggregator estimate (wage.is 2026; ~30,000 AFN informal 'average') — treat with strong caution: there is no functioning national wage survey
• The informal/agrarian majority earns far less
• NGO/UN & telecom staff earn $1,000+/mo
• skilled urban trades ~$150–500/mo
• civil-service grades run ~AFN 5,000–32,500/mo

Median salary

• n/a — no official median wage is published
• decades of conflict, an overwhelmingly informal/agrarian economy and the collapse of statistical capacity after the 2021 Taliban takeover make any national median unreliable

Minimum wage

• ~AFN 6,000/mo (~$90) for permanent government workers and ~AFN 5,500/mo (~$83) for non-permanent private-sector workers under the 2007 Labour Code
• no universal private-sector floor
• Enforcement is minimal and the law's status is uncertain under the Taliban

Cost of living

• Low — but Numbeo data is thin and low-confidence: Afghanistan had 218 price entries from 24 contributors (updated Jun 2026) and Kabul 140 entries from 15 contributors (Apr 2026)
• Kabul is ~22% cheaper than Islamabad
• Underlying reality is deep poverty — the UN estimates roughly half the population needs humanitarian assistance

Digital landscape

Population

43.3 million (Jan 2025, DataReportal; +2.9% YoY) — a very young, fast-growing population, swollen further by 2M+ returnees from Iran & Pakistan through 2025

Internet users

• 30.5% (~13.2 million users, Jan 2025)
• ~30.0 million still offline — one of the lowest penetration rates in Asia

Social media users

• 9.4% (~4.05 million identities, Jan 2025; = 18.5% of adults 18+)
• SEVERE gender gap: 84.9% male / 15.1% female

Mobile connections

• 22.3 million cellular connections = 51.6% of pop (Jan 2025)
• ~80.9% broadband-capable

Devices

mobile ~78.3% / desktop ~21.4% / tablet ~0.3% (StatCounter, Jun 2026)

Ad spend

• n/a — DataReportal publishes no national or digital ad-spend figure for Afghanistan
• the formal ad economy is tiny, cash-based and disrupted by sanctions, the banking freeze and repeated internet shutdowns

Top social platforms

Facebook ~4.05M ad reach = 18.5% of adults — THE dominant platform for news, community & social commerce

Messenger ~2.15M reach

Instagram ~1.30M reach = 3.0% of pop — urban, younger, diaspora

TikTok officially BANNED since 2022 but heavily used via VPN, especially by youth

LinkedIn ~590K — NGO/professional & diaspora

X/Twitter ~336K — small, political/journalist

• YouTube — very widely used for music, drama & news; DataReportal publishes no ad-reach figure for AF

Messengers

• WhatsApp (the default for chat, calls & business)
• Telegram (very popular for news channels, groups & file-sharing)
• Facebook Messenger (~2.15M reach)
• imo (cheap low-data international calls to the huge diaspora)

Payments & behaviour

Payment methods

• Cash (overwhelmingly dominant — the economy is heavily cash-based and largely unbanked)
• Hawala / money-transfer networks (the backbone of domestic & cross-border value transfer, incl. diaspora remittances)
• Cash-on-delivery (COD) — the default for virtually all e-commerce
• Bank transfer / Afghanistan Payment System (APS) — limited, urban & formal only
• Visa/Mastercard — negligible; international card rails were cut by post-2021 sanctions & the central-bank freeze

E-wallets

• HesabPay (the first & only interoperable digital wallet — Algorand-based; ~600K users, 3,000+ merchants across all 34 provinces; physical cards work offline)
• M-Paisa / MyMoney (legacy telecom mobile-money via Roshan/Etisalat — persistently low uptake)
• APS-linked bank apps (nascent)

Cash on delivery

• Very high — cash on delivery is the default and often only option for online orders
• digital prepayment is rare and distrusted

E-commerce

• Very low / infant stage — poor IT infrastructure, no reliable online payment rails, a cultural preference for familiar shops, and internet-shutdown risk
• Most 'online' selling happens informally via Facebook & WhatsApp

Notes

• Design every flow around cash + hawala + COD, not cards
• Sanctions and the central-bank freeze mean international card/PayPal rails barely function
• HesabPay is the standout local fintech but still small
• The Sept 2025 blackout froze banks and digital payments countrywide — build for intermittent connectivity

Audience & culture

Languages

• Dari / Persian (~77% can speak — the lingua franca and primary language of most media & commerce)
• Pashto (~48% first-language, up to ~68% can speak; dominant in the south & east and favored by the Taliban)
• Uzbek (~11%, north)
• Turkmen, Balochi, Nuristani, Pashai & Pamiri (smaller minorities)
• English (limited — educated urban & diaspora)

Religion

• Islam ~99.9% (state religion) — Sunni ~85–90% (mostly Hanafi) and Shia ~10–15% (mainly ethnic Hazara, Twelver, with a small Ismaili minority)
• Effectively no other faith is practiced openly

Median age

• 17.3 years (DataReportal, Jan 2025) — one of the youngest populations on earth
• over 40% are under 15

Key seasons

• Ramadan + Eid al-Fitr (the biggest social & spending period; activity shifts to late-night post-Iftar)
• Eid al-Adha (Qurbani — livestock & clothing spend)
• Nowruz / Afghan New Year (21 Mar — culturally huge but de-officialized by the Taliban in 2022 and muted amid restrictions & poverty)
• Wedding season (spring–summer) — a major discretionary-spend driver
• Harvest season (autumn) — rural cash incomes peak

Cultural notes

• Deeply conservative and now governed by an enforced Sharia morality regime: music is banned, women are barred from most public life and media, and male–female interaction is policed
• Creative must be extremely modest, male-oriented in-country and religiously careful
• The defining commercial reality is the enormous diaspora (Iran, Pakistan, Europe, North America, Gulf) — Dari/Pashto creators reach a global Afghan audience that converts far better than the sanctioned, cash-poor, VPN-dependent in-country users

Where to find creators

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Instagram
• TikTok (via VPN)
• Diaspora creators (US/EU/Iran/Pakistan)

Media landscape

Creators & public figures

Top creators

H

Humayun Shams ~780K Instagram

InstagramComedy sketches on daily Afghan life — a top Afghan/diaspora content creator

Hammasa Kohistani ~520K Instagram

InstagramModel — Afghan-British, Miss England 2005; fashion & lifestyle (brand-relevant for beauty)

A

Ajmal Haqiqi ~450K Instagram

InstagramFashion/model influencer — one of Afghanistan's best-known (detained by the Taliban in 2022, underscoring the risk to creators)

S

Shamayel Shalizi ~320K Instagram

InstagramJewelry designer/entrepreneur (Blingcessory) & women's-rights voice — diaspora

Z

Zulala Hashemi ~290K Instagram

InstagramSinger (Afghan Star finalist) & youth lifestyle

H

Huda Noor ~240K Instagram

InstagramBeauty & makeup creator — tutorials adapted for Afghan audiences (nutra/cosmetics relevance)

Celebrities

Rashid Khan ~11M Instagram (@rashid.khan19)

Star leg-spinner & T20I captain of Afghanistan's cricket team — the country's biggest global celebrity

Aryana Sayeed ~3M Instagram (@aryanasayeed)

Pop singer & women's-rights activist ('Voice of Afghanistan'), now in exile

Mohammad Nabi ~2M Instagram (@mohammadnabi07)

Veteran all-rounder & former captain of Afghanistan's cricket team

Farhad Darya ~1M Instagram (@farhaddaryaofficial)

Legendary singer-composer & UN goodwill ambassador — a cultural icon

Mozhdah Jamalzadah ~950K Instagram

Singer & former talk-show host (the 'Afghan Oprah'); women's-empowerment voice

Nadia Nadim ~520K Instagram (@nadi9nadim)

Afghan-Danish professional footballer & medical doctor

Khaled Hosseini ~220K Instagram (@khosseini)

Best-selling Afghan-American novelist ('The Kite Runner', 'A Thousand Splendid Suns')

Affiliate & traffic

Hot verticals

• Nutra / health & beauty (COD)
• E-commerce / dropshipping (electronics, phones, fashion via social commerce)
• Utility apps — VPN, browsers, file-sharing (huge demand given bans & shutdowns)
• Mobile VAS / content, airtime & apps
• Finance — remittances/hawala & Sharia-compliant offers (interest loans are out)
• Diaspora offers (money transfer, telecom, travel) — higher value than in-country

Active networks

• No Afghanistan-specific networks — media buyers use global CPA/affiliate platforms (Adsterra, PropellerAds, Mobidea, RichAds, Clickadu, Galaksion)
• Meta Ads & Google/YouTube Ads (self-serve; sanctions & payment friction complicate billing)
• Nutra/COD networks (Dr.Cash-style) for health & beauty offers
• Diaspora-focused campaigns run via MENA / Pakistan / Iran affiliate programs

Payouts

• Tier-3 very low — display CPMs roughly ~$0.1–0.5
• in-country CPA/CPL payouts are modest and COD margins thin
• The real value is diaspora traffic (Iran/Pakistan/EU/US/Gulf) served with Dari/Pashto creative, which pays multiples of in-country rates

Competition

• Very low — a small, under-served, low-purchasing-power market with very cheap CPMs, but hard to monetize: no card rails (cash/hawala/COD only), frequent internet shutdowns, banned verticals (gambling/crypto/adult/dating), a severe gender skew (~85% male users), VPN-mixed traffic quality and sanctions-related billing friction
• Best treated as a volume + diaspora play

Seasonality

• Ramadan/Eid (post-Iftar late-night usage & peak spending) is the high point
• wedding season (spring–summer) lifts discretionary spend
• watch for sudden internet shutdowns/blackouts that can zero out campaigns overnight

Traffic sources

• Facebook / Meta (dominant reach)
• YouTube
• Push & pop networks
• Instagram
• WhatsApp & Telegram
• Influencer / UGC (in-country + diaspora)

Good to know

Capital

Kabul

Major cities

• Kabul
• Kandahar
• Herat
• Mazar-i-Sharif
• Jalalabad
• Kunduz
• Ghazni
• Lashkar Gah

Time zones

• Single zone — Afghanistan Time (AFT, UTC+4:30), no daylight saving
• Mind the unusual half-hour offset when scheduling posts/campaigns

Android vs iOS

87%

Android 87% iOS 13%

Phone brands

• Samsung (~43.7%)
• Xiaomi (~15.9%)
• Apple (~12.7%)
• Infinix (~3.5%)
• Itel (~2.9%)
• Transsion & other budget brands (much of the ~8% 'unknown')

Top e-commerce

• AzPag (marketplace app)
• Amtaa
• Afghan Bazar
• e-Tohfa (Kabul gifts/retail)
• Ubuy Afghanistan (cross-border)
• Facebook/WhatsApp social commerce (the real volume)

Peak activity

Evenings ~20:00–23:00 AFT (after work & dinner); during Ramadan activity shifts to late-night post-Iftar; Friday (Jumu'ah) reshapes the daytime rhythm

Creative taboos

• Islam & modesty (respect always)
• women's dress, rights & visibility (Taliban restrictions make female imagery risky)
• music (officially banned)
• alcohol, pork, gambling & interest (all haram)
• LGBTQ themes (illegal, a capital offense)
• Taliban politics
• ethnic tensions (Pashtun/Tajik/Hazara/Uzbek)
• Nowruz sensitivities

Also worth knowing

1. Infrastructure is politically hostage — the Sept 2025 nationwide fibre shutdown shows connectivity can vanish overnight; build campaigns resilient to blackouts.
2. The large diaspora (Iran, Pakistan, Europe, North America) is the highest-value audience — target it with Dari/Pashto creative on Facebook/YouTube.
3. No card rails: everything is cash, hawala, COD or HesabPay.
4. Extreme gender skew (84.9% of social users male) means female-targeted in-country reach is tiny, and heavy VPN reliance distorts geo-targeting & traffic quality