South Africa has the lowest proportion of remote job vacancies among the African countries analysed in a new global study, even as the country actively courts foreign remote workers.
Research by digital financial services company Remitly found that just 17.6% of South African job listings on LinkedIn were advertised as remote, the lowest proportion among the African countries it analysed.
That compared with 19.5% in Ghana and 21.8% in Egypt.
At the opposite end of the rankings, some 98.5% of LinkedIn vacancies associated with Equatorial Guinea were tagged as remote, followed by 95.4% in the Republic of the Congo and 94.7% in Cape Verde. Sierra Leone came in at 92.4%, while Ethiopia was also among the world's leading remote-work markets at 83.5%.
The findings come from Remitly's Remote Jobs Index 2026, which analysed around 7.8 million LinkedIn job listings during May to compare the availability of remote work around the world.
Researchers applied LinkedIn's country filter and calculated the proportion of listings in each market tagged as remote. They also examined entry-level vacancies and the number of applicants for recently advertised remote jobs to assess competition.
The figures therefore measure the proportion of LinkedIn vacancies tagged as remote, rather than the proportion of people in each country who actually work from home.
South Africa's position at the bottom of the African ranking does not mean it is among the world's worst places to look for remote work.
Its 17.6% figure was comfortably ahead of several much larger economies. Only 8.4% of US vacancies analysed were remote, while the proportion was 10.1% in the UK and 7.6% in Australia.
Germany came in at 6%, France at 4.7% and the Netherlands at 4.6%. China had the lowest proportion in the global study, with only 2.7% of its LinkedIn vacancies tagged as remote. - IOL