Successful marriages: | ~80% |
Average bride cost: | $5,090 – $26,290 |
Average bride age: | 24 y.o. |
🔥Best African brides website: | SakuraDate |
👍Best African dating site: | Eastern Honeys |
Divorce rate: | ~20% |
International dating sites with South African women are growing rapid-fire in the US. But why? That’s why we’ve studied the African bride market to learn the reasons for popularity, how to search, the average bride price, and much more about beautiful African ladies. Read on!
African Mail Order Brides & Dating Sites in 2023
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🔥 Best choice | 🎁 Get free credits |
SakuraDate |
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Best mobile experience | 🎁 Get free credits |
EasternHoneys |
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Best reply rate | 🎁 Get free credits |
OrchidRomance |
African mail order bride cost
The African bride price is probably one of the most common things men ask searching for South African brides. However, men can’t just choose an African girl from the catalog, pay a fixed price and get a wife—it’s just a myth. Men can meet an African woman who wants to find foreign husbands online, start dating her, then meet in real life and get married if it works for both of them. Though it costs money, it has nothing to do with buying an African bride. Still, it’s natural to be interested in the price of such a relationship, as before, to jump into using mail order bride services—it’s worth exploring whether you can afford it.
To help you get that estimate, we gathered the main expenses you might have searching for an African woman for marriage. Let’s explore all the components of the African bride price.
Popular African brides profiles





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Online dating expenses
The cost of mail order bride services is the first expense you face when looking for your African lady. To help you, we found all the main categories of mail order brides sites and apps in Africa and the current costs.
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$10-50/mo. |
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$0,2-1,5/credit |
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$30-60/mo. |
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Usually, it takes around 2 months to find an African woman through a dating site. So, consider that when calculating your bride price. Also, exploring dating apps and sites to meet an African girl, we collected a few ways to help you get the most value for the cost:
- Keep an eye on platforms that offer discounts for new members. For example, Love Fort offers a first purchase discount where 20 credits cost $2.99 instead of $9.99, or Colombia Lady provides a 1-month free premium worth 9.99 with the 1rst purchase.
- Check seasonal discounts—they can be from 20% to 50%.
- Go for credit-based platforms, as you don't pay when you don't use the site.
Following these few tips can help you get the best bride price and cut unnecessary expenses.
Expenses on traveling to Africa and marriage
Another component of the bride price is travel expenses. Those can vary from a couple to tens of thousands of dollars depending on your destination, personal traveling preferences, and the time you plan to spend in Africa.
In our experience, the biggest expense field are plane tickets, accommodation, and transportation in the country. According to our calculations, it's most cost-effective to fly to such countries in Africa:
- Namibia
- Rwanda
- Ghana
And these 3 countries are the most expensive in Africa in terms of traveling:
- Egypt – a popular tourist destination
- Kenya – many people come there to enjoy a safari, so prices are inflated
- Zanzibar – the Maldives of Africa might be cheaper than the actual ones, but still quite expensive
To help you have a more precise estimate of a bride cost, we calculated the cost of trips to the top 3 locations in Africa that are the most popular countries among the US people:
Morocco
*Prices provided according to BudgetYourTrip.com.
Nigeria
*Prices provided according to BudgetYourTrip.com.
Ethiopia
*Prices provided according to BudgetYourTrip.com.
These are travel costs for the top countries in Africa. The African bride price from other popular countries in Africa has been collected in the infographic below.
Moreover, a South African bride must apply for a K-1 visa (if you want to get married in the US), which costs around $2,290. And you also need to budget for a wedding. The average cost of a wedding in the US in 2022 was around $20,000.
Country | Online dating services | 2-week trip (x2) | Visa | License + Wedding | Total |
South Africa | $1,200 | $2,400 | $2,290 | $20,050 | $5,890-$25,940 |
Namibia | $1,200 | $2,300 | $2,290 | $20,050 | $5,790-$25,840 |
Kenya | $1,200 | $2,600 | $2,290 | $20,050 | $6,090-$26,140 |
Rwanda | $1,200 | $1,600 | $2,290 | $20,050 | $5,090-$25,140 |
Cape Verde | $1,200 | $2,750 | $2,290 | $20,050 | $6,240-$26,290 |
Men’s stories about dating and marriage with a woman from Africa
During our research of African mail order brides, we interviewed 3 men who were or are in a relationship with a lady from South Africa. And that's what we found:
How to find South African brides online
Over the years of work, we have come across many ways of meeting foreign women, but the main ones remain online and offline ways to get a bride from South Africa. Both can help you meet many women, but they have different effects and won't suit all daters the same.
Going to Africa to find a wife offline
If you were looking for a date locally, you can meet a date through friends, at parties, or just in your favorite cafe. International dating works similarly, but there are still a few things to consider, like arranging a trip yourself or going on a bride tour.
Mail order brides tours still happen in 2023, but it's getting harder to find a good option if you have serious intentions. Also, Africa is a large continent, and romance tours are usually arranged for the biggest ones, like Cape Town, South Africa, or Abuja, Nigeria, while other countries don't have bride tours.
A regular wife tour to Africa usually includes:
- Round-trip tickets
- Accommodation and transportation
- Events and parties where a guy can meet single girls from South Africa who are open to relationships with a foreigner
- Translation services (if needed)
Basically, with a romance tour, a man buys a fully-organized trip to one of the countries in Africa, and the agency also selects compatible women and arranges meetings and parties.
In most cases, there are 2 types of such tours. First, solo romance tours, when there is one man, and second, group tours, where 5–7 guys meet girls from Africa at the same time. Group tours can be up to 50% cheaper than solo ones. They allow guys who want to become husbands and explore African culture to spend less money on their trip and therefore lower the bride price.
- Guys who like traveling and want to meet women from South Africa IRL
- Men who don’t like dating online for personal reasons
- People who are sure that long-distance doesn’t work for them
- Singles who don’t want to spend large sums on the chance to meet a partner from Africa
- People who have particular preferences in the type of wife they want, and who want to use advanced matching for that
- Men who don’t like to compete for the best brides in group events
Using dating services to meet women from Africa
Dating online is not only the most popular way to meet a girl from Africa for marriage but also effective and convenient. In our experience, more than 85% of international couples from distant countries start online. To help you understand how it works, we created a step-by-step guide on how to meet a woman from South Africa through a dating app or site.

❗️Don't join the first you see on Google. Explore your options when you choose a place to date women from Africa. It's always worth exploring niche platforms like Latin Feels, as they have more candidates from the region you are seeking. International websites might also work, but you'll need to choose from different ethnic groups.
❗️Check costs and hidden fees. The “money question” can also become a deal-breaker. So read professional reviews of the site you want to join. Such reviews usually have a cost of paid services and tell whether the platform is legit.
❗️Create an eye-catching profile, as it's half the battle. Some guys forget that girls from Africa are choosing too. So, fill in your profile, add 5-7 good photos of you, and communicate your intentions on the site. Also, it's worth going through verification to help women know that you're a real human being.
❗️Choose the most profitable and effective communication ways. A big chunk of the bride price is mail order bride services. Thus choosing a cost-effective option for communication can help you save money, but you should also consider what works for you. Different services work for different people.
❗️Don't contact all hot girls from Africa. It's just too expensive and time-consuming. Use search filters to find the most compatible matches. If you have a favorite location, like Cape Town, South Africa, you can use location search too. But don't talk to more than 5 ladies, as it's not cheap and you get very distracted.
These are simple tips, but thanks to them, you can avoid many problems and find your perfect match quickly and easily.
Read also: In Search of Beautiful Vietnamese Brides or Girls for Dating—Is It Even Worth It?
African mail order bride statistics
To create an image of an average African bride and help you get a full understanding of modern South African women, we studied current statistics. That's what we have found:
- In 2019, 3,549 African brides came to the US to marry a foreign husband in the US. But in 2020, the number dropped to 1,906 because of the pandemic restrictions. Still, in 2021, we already see a growing tendency, as 2,488 African brides came to the US that year.
- Moroccan, Nigerian, and Ethiopian brides make up almost 50% of African women marrying abroad. In terms of age, 20% of African girls are 16–20 years, 41% are 21-25, 24% are 26-30, 11% are 31-35, and only 4% are over 35 years old.
- The average age of African women at 1st marriage varies from 17.2 in the Republic of the Niger to 33 in South Africa. In comparison, the average marriage age for women in the US is 28.6.
- The average number of children in African families also drastically varies depending on the particular country. Thus, in 2022 the fertility rate ranged from 2.3 in Morocco to 6.6 in Niger, while the US stats show only 1.8.
- The average age difference between an African mail order wife and her US husband is usually around 6–9 years. So, we can say that the age gap isn't a problem for a typical African woman, and many choose to date older men.
- The success rate of marriages with women from African countries is 80%. That is significantly higher than local marriages in the US, as in 2022, we saw a 40% to 50% divorce rate.
As we can see from the statistics, foreign men have shown increasing interest in beautiful women from Africa. And African ladies, on average, tend to start families earlier in their lives and have bigger families.
Expert POV on African mail order brides
African brides scams—Help your money to stay in your pocket
Unfortunately, no site in the world can claim to be 100% scammer-free. In 2021, FTC reported more than $547M in losses to online romance scams. That's why all singles who are considering searching for a partner in South Africa should learn those common scam schemes.

Conclusion
After our deep dive into African brides, we can say that searching for a bride in South Africa will work for you if you prefer the traditional division of gender roles, don't mind exploring a new culture, and want to start a family and don't play around the bush. But if you want a girl with a more westernized mindset, choose a lady from a European country.
Sources of information
- travel.state.gov (FY 2019)
- travel.state.gov (FY 2020)
- travel.state.gov (FY 2021)
- cis.org
- wikipedia.org (Age at first marriage)
- wikipedia.org (Total fertility rate)
- ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- divorce.com
- fool.com