Sustainable Development in African Countries: An Indicator-Based Approach and Recommendations for the Future

Abstract

This study addresses problems related to the level of sustainable development in African countries in the years 2002–2016. The introduction presents the current situation in Africa, the occurring transformations as well as the goals and definitions of sustainable development. The significance of social order in the aforementioned development has also been highlighted. The next part of the article features sustainability indicators, selected for the analysis and covering all the essential aspects, i.e., social, economic, environmental, spatial, institutional and political areas. The applied research method was the synthetic measure of development (SMD), whereas the data for calculations and analyses were retrieved from the sources of the World Bank. The key part of the study presents the research results showing the position of individual countries regarding the level of implementation of the sustainable development concept in the period 2002–2016. As part of the added value the selected problems of Africa and ways of solving them, along with the recommendations for the future, were listed and characterised. It was concluded that the situation of the African countries, in terms of their sustainable development level, improved significantly in the period under analysis. The crucial problem is that the discussed countries are still experiencing a relatively unfavourable situation in this respect. Cape Verde and Ghana are among the countries recording the best results. The least favourable situation was observed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Chad, Central African Republic and Eritrea.