Assessment Regional Attractiveness of African Countries Based on UN SDG

There are many types of assessments of regions that create rankings from subjective evaluations of a single characteristic (e.g. Human Development Index). These rankings allegedly represent the level of maturity of a country and categorise regions as being prosperous or unsuccessful. In doing so, they tend to create competition which is, however, based on very questionable assumptions about the nature of the evaluated regions. To address the shortcomings of such common assessments, we propose a novel approach. It divides individual territories into groups based on common characteristics regarding their regional attractiveness. This paper aims to introduce the assessment of attractiveness based on the processing of 44 open-source input datasets. They describe economics, living conditions or population. The input data are divided into six classes about the selected UN Sustainable Development Goals. Particular countries are grouped into clusters determined through hierarchical cluster analysis. Such an approach can provide a non-conflicting view of regions’ features, enable more effective cooperation and problem-solving and allow for more effectively targeted and, therefore, cheaper support. The results of this research are different diagrams and thematic maps, which depict the different groups of similar countries. With these outputs, we identify countries of remarkable similarity, countries that are most typical for the African continent regarding their regional attractiveness, and countries that present unique features. In several cases, clusters follow the traditional classification of African countries (UN sub-regions). However, there are also several surprising findings, such as the exciting variety of countries around the Gulf of Guinea. The used method and maps can be applied in many various domains such as regional development, international aid, economics, geography or education.