LONDON - Tanzania is Africa’s happiest country, according to a report by the Global Mind Project. The East African country was ranked as the third happiest in the world, following only Sri Lanka and the Dominican Republic, which was crowned the world’s happiest. The annual report is based on a survey of 500,000 people in 71 countries.
In Africa, Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Tunisia and Angola were among the ten happiest countries on the continent. South Africa, however, is the least happy country in Africa, and has the greatest proportion of survey respondents who are distressed or struggling.
The Mental State of the World report is the annual report of the Global Mind Project, an ongoing, comprehensive survey of the mental wellbeing of the Internet-enabled world. The objective of the Global Mind Project is to provide an evolving global map of mental wellbeing and enable deep insights into its drivers that can be used for more effective management of population mental wellbeing through evidence-based social policy and interventions.
2023 was the 4th year of the project and consolidates responses from over 500,000 individuals collected during the year across 71 countries spanning 9 geographic regions (Core Anglosphere, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Central, South and South East Asia and West and North Africa) and 13 languages [English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Portuguese (European and Brazilian), German, Swahili, Hindi, Italian, Russian, Hebrew and (Simpli ed) Chinese]. This includes an additional 7 countries and 4 new languages compared to 2022.
As of October 2023, there were 5.3 billion active Internet users worldwide, representing 65.7% of the global population. In countries like the United States where Internet penetration is >90%, the Global Mind data is closely representative of the general population and aligns with national census trends1. However, this is not so for countries in Asia and Africa where the Internet-enabled population are typically a minority and generally represent higher socioeconomic groups or those who have achieved greater levels of education. Trends reported here are not likely to be reflective of offline populations who typically live in a different context and therefore country level trends may differ substantially from the Global Mind trends.
Executive Summary
This Mental State of the World Report is the annual report of the Global Mind Project and provides trends and insights on the mental wellbeing of Internet-enabled populations around the globe. In 2023, we collected data from over 500,000 respondents in 13 languages across 71 countries that spanned 9 regions. Data is collected using the MHQ assessment, a comprehensive online survey of cognitive and emotional capabilities that provides an overall mental wellbeing metric (the MHQ score) as well as multiple dimensional views that relate to the ability to navigate the normal stresses of life and function productively. Key insights this year are as follows:
• Mental wellbeing remained at its post-pandemic low with yet again no sign of movement towards pre-pandemic levels. In 2023, at both a global level and at the level of individual countries, MHQ scores remained largely unchanged relative to 2021 and 2022, after a sharp drop during the pandemic years. This raises important questions about the lasting impact of the pandemic, and how shifts in the way we live and work and the ampli cation of existing habits (e.g. remote working, online communication, consumption of ultra-processed food, use of single- use plastics) have cumulatively pushed us into a space of poorer mental wellbeing.
• Younger generations, particularly those under age 35, saw the steepest declines in mental wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic while those over 65 stayed steady. With these declines persisting across all age groups, the pandemic ampli ed a pre-existing trend of poorer mental wellbeing for younger generations that is now visible across the globe.
• As in previous years, several African and Latin American countries topped the country rankings, while wealthier countries of the Core Anglosphere such as the United Kingdom and Australia are towards the bottom. This pattern suggests that greater wealth and economic development do not necessarily lead to greater mental wellbeing. In 2023, data from the Global Mind Project identi ed key factors that explain these patterns, such as getting a smartphone at a young age, frequently eating ultra-processed food and a fraying of friendships and family relationships, that are typically more prevalent in Internet-enabled populations of wealthier countries.
Overall, the insights in this report paint a worrying picture of our post-pandemic prospects and we urgently need to better understand the drivers of our collective mental wellbeing such that we can align our ambitions and goals with the genuine prosperity of human beings.
To download the full report, visit: https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/4th-Annual-Mental-State-of-the-World-Report.pdf
