Somalia ranked among Africa’s happiest countries, report says

The report, released on Monday, ranks Algeria as Africa’s happiest country, followed by Mauritius. Libya, despite its ongoing political and security challenges, is ranked third, ahead of Morocco.

Somalia takes fifth place, ranking ahead of Nigeria and South Africa, which are placed seventh. Tunisia is eighth, followed by Egypt in ninth and Sierra Leone in 10th. Cameroon and Kenya also feature among the countries ranked relatively highly on the continent.

At the bottom of the African rankings are Benin, Madagascar, South Sudan, Liberia, Guinea, Togo, Rwanda, Tanzania and Burundi, with the Central African Republic ranked lowest.

Globally, Norway displaced Denmark as the world’s happiest country, according to the report. The Nordic countries continued to dominate the upper end of the rankings.

The World Happiness Report 2017 was produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), a global initiative launched under the auspices of the United Nations in 2012. It assessed 155 countries.

The rankings are based on six key measures: gross domestic product per capita, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, social support and perceptions of corruption in government and business.

The report found that countries in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Syria and Yemen, generally recorded the lowest levels of reported happiness.

It also highlighted significant disparities within African countries, noting that the average life-evaluation scores in more than four out of five African countries were below the midpoint of the scale.

Only two African countries were found to have made significant gains in happiness over the previous decade, while inequalities in life evaluations remained substantial.

The findings underline the complex relationship between economic conditions, social support, governance and people’s perceptions of their quality of life.

For Somalia, the fifth-place ranking comes despite the country’s prolonged conflict and political instability, highlighting the difficulty of measuring national well-being through economic and social indicators alone.