Well-being-Related Statistics in Africa: Status and Implications for Policy Discussions

Date
Section
OoD
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Publications
Keywords Description 1. Introduction
The global discourse on well-being measures continues to shift beyond narrow monetary and unitary perspectives toward broader indicators of deprivation, human development, subjective well-being, and, more recently, the discussions of a “Beyond-GDP” metric. These efforts reflect a legitimate desire for a richer account of how people live, the deprivations they face, and whether development is improving their lives. This legitimacy aligns with both the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Third United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (2018–2027), which call for relevant, high-quality, and comparable data and statistics.

The variety of the well-being measures, specifically, monetary poverty, national and global multidimensional poverty indices (MPI), human development index, per capita income, and happiness index, depending on their construction, either guide policy formulation, monitoring, or evaluation. However, the challenge of non-comparability and variations in the context of use has led to a practice in which development practitioners use them at their discretion. For instance, with the World Bank in 2024 reporting that approximately 45.0 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lived on less than $3.00 a day, and the United Nations Development Program and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative publishing 553 million people living in poverty in SSA, representing about 35.0 percent of the population, users at their discretion have used either of these statistics.

The differences in well-being-related measures can be traced to a multiplicity of factors, including conceptualisation, scope, measurement, data sources, timing, and frequency. These differences risk escalating, as the community of statisticians and development practitioners in the context of the “Beyond-GDP” subtly proposes consolidating these measures, despite their inherent incompatibility. The “Beyond GDP” initiative proposes offering a broader economic, social, and environmental perspective on well-being, using per capita GDP and the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) as foundational indicators. The proposal to deploy a Well-being Adjusted GDP (WAGDP) indicator that includes the MPI and other inequality and environmental indicators would inherit the statistical limitations of MPI production, which primarily relies on infrequent, externally supported household surveys, such as the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). In the context of this escalating complexity, the brief addresses three objectives. First, it assesses the comparability of different well-being-related measures for the continent. Second, it uncovers the intra- and inter-gaps in data and statistics on well-being-related measures, and third, advocates for national and regional commitment in defining well-being-related measures for Africa.

In the next sections, section two describes the data and methodology, followed by well-being-related statistics in Africa in section three. Sections four and five discuss the disconnect and the well-being indicator puzzle, respectively. The last two sections offer a prompt for a discussion on the use of emerging data sources for well-being measurements in Africa and a conclusion.
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