Cheerful Discontent: Understanding the African Well-being Paradox

Abstract

While positive affect and life evaluation are positively correlated in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), their relationship is much weaker than in Western countries, suggesting a misalignment between how people feel and how they judge their lives, a pattern we refer to as the African well-being paradox. Using Gallup World Poll microdata (2013–2024) covering 39 SSA and 27 Western countries, we construct an individual-level measure of this misalignment: the difference between positive affect and life evaluation scores (the PA-LE balance) and analyse its determinants using eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our results show that the PA-LE balance in SSA is both higher and more widely dispersed than in Western countries. More than two-thirds of individuals in SSA exhibit a positive balance and can be classified as “cheerfully discontented”. In contrast, Western countries exhibit a narrower, more symmetric distribution. Across regions, optimism and negative affect account for the largest share of predictive attribution. The distinct SSA pattern arises not from different drivers, but from their configuration: comparatively low economic optimism coexists with relatively low negative affect. This suggests that structural constraints shape life evaluations, while relational and social resources sustain positive daily experiences, creating a situation of “cheerful discontent”.