Forbes' 2013 'Saddest Countries' List and Why Africa Dominated It

In January 2013, Forbes contributor Christopher Helman published a ranking of the world’s happiest and saddest countries, built from the Legatum Institute’s 2012 Prosperity Index, an annual assessment that scores 142 countries across categories including economy, governance, health, safety and personal freedom rather than relying on a single wealth or happiness metric. The list’s bottom end, its “saddest” countries, was dominated by nations recovering from conflict, authoritarian rule or extreme poverty, and African countries filled most of those slots.

The Central African Republic sat at the very bottom of the ranking, the single saddest country on the list, a placement Forbes tied to the country’s per capita GDP of roughly $790 a year, a life expectancy around 48, and internet access reaching only about 2 percent of households at the time. The Democratic Republic of Congo followed at number two, with Afghanistan at three, Chad at four and Haiti at five. Rounding out the bottom ten were Burundi, Togo, Zimbabwe, Yemen and Ethiopia, a top-ten list split seven ways in Africa’s direction against just three non-African countries.

That pattern held as the list extended further: among the bottom 20 countries, 15 were African, including Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Mozambique and Nigeria, which landed at number 20, the least “sad” of the African nations on the list but still notable enough that Nigerian outlets covered the ranking as its own story. The concentration reflected a real, if blunt, pattern in the underlying Legatum data: a cluster of African states scored lowest across the index’s governance, safety and economic categories that year, often the same countries dealing with recent civil conflict, weak state capacity or extended periods of authoritarian rule.

Forbes published a separate happiest-and-saddest list later that same year, in October 2013, drawing on the newly released 2013 edition of the Legatum index, and the rankings shifted noticeably between the two: Chad, fourth-saddest in January, dropped to the very bottom of the list by October, with the Central African Republic and DR Congo following just behind it, an illustration of how much a single year’s data revision can reorder even a broad, 142-country index and a reminder that any snapshot ranking like this describes a specific moment rather than a fixed hierarchy of national wellbeing.