Two bottom-up anthropogenic inventories of annual nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions used for the manuscript submitted by Marais et al. (2025) for review in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. The inventories are compared to top-down estimates of NOx emissions for isolated urban and power plant hotspot emissions across Sub-Saharan Africa.The two inventories are the regional Dynamics-Aerosol-Chemistry-Cloud Interactions in West Africa (DACCIWA) inventory covering the whole African continent, and a regional regulatory inventory for northeast South Africa covering 21.38-30.69°S and 25.59-33.89°E. Emissions are for 2018 from the DACCIWA inventory, and 2019 for the northeast South Africa inventory. DACCIWA is lead developed by Sekou Keita. The regional northeast South Africa inventory data, provided by Mogesh Naidoo, is developed to support air quality regulation in the Highveld region of South Africa.The data files provided include a compressed file (dacciwa_anthro_nox_emis_by_sector_2018.tar.gz) of individual NetCDF DACCIWA sector-specific emissions of aviation, energy, flaring, manufacturing, residential, open west burning, transport, and other sector emissions on a 0.1° grid and a single NetCDF file (NESA-NOx-emissions-grid6km-2019.nc) of all NOx emissions for northeast South Africa on a 0.06° grid.