Mapped: Happiness Levels Across Africa

Kayla Zhu
2025-04-03 01:12:00
www.visualcapitalist.com

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Which African Countries are the Happiest (and Least Happy?)

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Africa remains the world’s unhappiest region, with an average happiness score of just 4.4 this year.

While several countries have seen strong economic progress in recent years, many areas still face high poverty rates, ongoing conflicts, political instability, and weak infrastructure, which negatively impact overall happiness levels.

This map showcases the findings for Afrian countries from the 2025 World Happiness Report, an annual publication that measures global contentment based on life evaluations, social support, freedom of choice, GDP per capita, and additional indicators of well-being. The data is drawn from the Gallup World Poll and various supplementary sources.

Each nation’s score in the World Happiness Report reflects an average of life evaluations over a three-year span (2022–2024 for this edition), ranking countries from highest to lowest. A more detailed explanation of the report’s methodology can be found at the end of this article.

The Most and Least Happy Countries in Africa 2025

Below, we show the happiness scores of African countries from the World Happiness Report 2025.

Global Rank	Country	Average Happiness Score (2022-2024)
78	Mauritius	5.8
79	Libya	5.8
84	Algeria	5.6
95	South Africa	5.2
96	Mozambique	5.2
97	Gabon	5.1
98	Côte d’Ivoire	5.1
100	Congo	5.0
102	Guinea	4.9
103	Namibia	4.9
104	Cameroon	4.9
105	Nigeria	4.9
107	Senegal	4.9
110	Niger	4.7
112	Morocco	4.6
113	Tunisia	4.6
114	Mauritania	4.5
115	Kenya	4.5
116	Uganda	4.5
117	Gambia	4.4
119	Chad	4.4
120	Burkina Faso	4.4
121	Benin	4.4
122	Somalia	4.3
123	Mali	4.3
125	Ghana	4.3
127	Togo	4.3
129	Liberia	4.3
130	Madagascar	4.2
131	Zambia	3.9
132	Ethiopia	3.9
135	Egypt	3.8
136	Tanzania	3.8
137	Eswatini	3.8
138	Lesotho	3.8
139	Comoros	3.8
141	Democratic Republic of the Congo	3.5
142	Botswana	3.4
143	Zimbabwe	3.4
144	Malawi	3.3
146	Sierra Leone	3.0

This year, West African coastal nation Sierra Leone surpassed Lesotho as the unhappiest country in Africa.

The country, one of Africa’s poorest nations, had the second-lowest happiness score in the world.

After its brutal civil war from 1991 to 2002, Sierra Leone continues to grapple with poverty, weak governance, and economic instability, contributing to its low happiness ranking.

Over on the eastern coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius surpassed Libya as Africa’s happiest country in 2025. The country is known to have a stable democracy, strong economy, and relatively higher quality of life.

It’s also the most peaceful country in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Global Peace Index.

African countries were also among those that saw the greatest changes in their happiness scores this year.

Lesotho recorded the biggest jump in happiness score, rising by 0.6 points from 3.2 to 3.8 this year. However, it still ranks among the least happy countries worldwide.

Meanwhile, Sierra Leone’s score dipped by 0.3, dropping from 3.3 in 2024 to 3.0 in 2025–one of the biggest drops in score from this year’s report.

Where does this data come from?

Source: The World Happiness Report which leverages data from the Gallup World Poll.

Methodology: The World Happiness Report derives its rankings from Gallup World Poll data, surveying approximately 1,000 people per country per year across 140+ countries. The total sample size typically exceeds 140,000 respondents annually. The rankings are based on three-year averages, from 2022 to 2024. Respondents evaluate their lives using the Cantril Ladder, a 0-to-10 scale. The rankings are based on six key factors: GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity (measured by charitable acts), and perceptions of corruption. In addition to life evaluations, the report examines emotional well-being through positive and negative affect indicators, such as laughter, worry, and sadness. The 2025 edition also emphasizes social trust and benevolence, analyzing behaviors like sharing meals, helping strangers, and returning lost wallets to assess how caring and community engagement contribute to happiness.

Criticisms: Critics of the World Happiness Report point out that survey questions measure satisfaction with socioeconomic conditions as opposed to individual emotional happiness. As well, there are myriad cultural differences around the world that influence how people think about happiness and life satisfaction. Finally, there can be big differences in life satisfaction between groups within a country, which are averaged out even in a nationally representative group. The report does acknowledge inequality as a factor by measuring the “gap” between the most and least happy halves of each country.

Learn More on the Voronoi App

To compare country happiness rankings from a different region, check out this graphic that visualizes the happiness levels across East Asia and Oceania.

The post Mapped: Happiness Levels Across Africa appeared first on Visual Capitalist.

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