This evolving narrative goes beyond surface-level financial statistics to examine the emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of life across African communities. It recognizes that metrics like GDP fail to capture what truly matters to people: their relationships, sense of purpose, inner peace, and cultural rootedness. By using indicators such as trust, belonging, and shared responsibility, researchers are surfacing a deeper truth: that flourishing in Africa is not simply about how much a nation produces, but how well its people live, connect, and thrive.
Speaking to Global South Pole, Dr. Victor Counted, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Regent University, who is at the forefront of this reimagining of well-being metrics, argues that GDP is far too blunt a tool to capture the complex social and cultural realities of African societies. He emphasized that by ignoring spiritual values, communal bonds, and everyday resilience, conventional measures of progress overlook what truly sustains life.
“We needed an African or Africa-specific model because African values like Ubuntu, Ujamaa, Wazobia, all these sensibilities actually, in a sense, prioritize some kind of collective well-being. Most of them, interestingly, don't say so much about GDP. They kind of ignore it in some sense. If our sense of well-being [depends] on our collective interdependence, that has implications in terms of what we should focus on. Standard indexes […] like the GDP, for example, often overlook things like people's sense of spirituality and resilience. Yet these are really key sources of flourishing, especially within an African life or in Africa in itself,” Dr. Counted explained.
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