Social Climate, Social Capital, and Social Goods in Sub-Saharan African Countries: Implications for Sustainable Development

This work analyses the findings of the 2021 World Happiness Report (WHR) and World Social Capital Monitor (WSCM) for Sub-Saharan African countries to provide a better understanding of the social climate in the region. The WHR measures peoples’ subjective happiness in countries around the globe, focusing on seven key factors: happiness, gross domestic product, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, perception of corruption, and generosity. The WSCM is a worldwide open access Social Capital Survey for citizens to better understand the social environment in their countries. Developed by the Basel Institute of Commons and Economics (http://commons.ch/) for the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development partnership, the WSCM serves as a tool within the UN framework to promote Sustainable Development Goals. This open access online survey (http://commons.ch/assessing-social-capital/), conducted in 50 languages and 300 cities as of 2021, assesses the social capital of countries worldwide. Timelines and comments, for eight social goods (climate, trust, measures, taxes, invest, helpfulness, friendliness, hospitality) provided by the survey, have been published annually since 2017 for each country affiliated with the WSCM. Both the WHR and WSCM reports aim to measure the social climate by considering a particular set of factors. In this study, two data sets containing the values for these factors are used to analyse the social climate in Sub-Saharan African countries. A range of techniques, including data visualisation, correlation coefficients, and clustering, are employed to identify the characteristics of the countries in the region and the interrelationships between them based on these factors.