Africa and World Happiness Report

 The Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford published the World Happiness Report 2025.  The focus of this year's report is the impact of caring and sharing on people's happiness.  It includes factors such as giving money to charity, volunteering, and helping strangers.  It tries to measure the degree of benevolence in each of the 147 countries that it evaluates.  

The five highest ranked African countries are Mauritius (78), Libya (79), Algeria (84), South Africa (95), and Mozambique (96). Seven of the ten lowest ranked countries are in Africa: Lesotho (138), Comoros (139), DRC (141), Botswana (142), Zimbabwe (143), Malawi (144), and Sierra Leone (146).

Africa and the World Giving Index

The UK-based Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) has just released its CAF World Giving Index 2018. The index evaluates giving behavior by country based on helping a stranger, donating money, and volunteering time. In 2018, CAF evaluated 144 countries, 41 of them in Africa.

African countries scored generally well; 18 were ranked above the global midpoint and 23 were ranked below the global midpoint. The best scoring African countries were Kenya (8), Nigeria (16), Liberia (19), Sierra Leone (20), and Zambia (21). The worst scoring African countries were Tunisia (135), Mauritania (133), Togo (117), Congo Brazzaville (115), and Gabon (113). For purposes of comparison, the United States was ranked 4, the United Kingdom 6, France 72, Russia 110, and China 142.