Building Joyful cities: is urbanization always pave a path to happiness in Africa?

Achieving planned urbanization through sustainable cities and communities is one of the main objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals, and there is a rich literature on this topic. Therefore, in this paper, we examine the impact of urbanization on happiness in a sample of 30 African countries. To do so, we use the ordinary least squares (OLS) method, the Driscoll-Kraay method, whose robustness has been proven by the Lewbel two-stage least squares (2SLS) method, and the generalized moments in system (S-GMM) method for the period of 2006–2019. Our results show that urbanization significantly increases happiness in African countries. We obtain the same result by level of development (middle-income countries and low-middle-income countries) and by African regional zone, except North and Southern Africa, where we find that urbanization contributes to a deterioration in individual well-being. Similarly, our results show that although urbanization significantly improves happiness in African countries, this result may be further amplified by the level of development. We therefore suggest that a good urbanization policy (planned urbanization) should be put in place to create conditions that will increase individual happiness, given that this is an issue that has economic implications, especially in the long term.