Quality of Life Initiative

About

An urban continent

Urbanization is one of the four interconnected megatrends shaping Africa, along with demographic shifts, climate change and digital technologies. Africa’s cities are growing faster than anywhere else, presenting immense opportunities to fast-track progress on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 2063 Agenda for ‘The Africa We Want’. But urban growth alone is not enough. To fully unlock these opportunities, cities must intentionally embrace people-first development strategies that ensure progress leads to real improvements in people’s daily lives.

Traditional economic metrics, like GDP, tell us how much an economy produces, but not how well people are living. They do not reveal whether households have clean water, whether communities feel safe and included, or whether people are satisfied with their lives. As a result, these critical aspects of well-being remain untracked, making it harder for cities to make decisions that genuinely improve people’s daily lives.

As urban populations grow rapidly, especially in Africa, the need for multidimensional metrics and participatory governance has never been more urgent. While global urban well-being frameworks increasingly call for these approaches, African cities face systemic challenges in implementing them due to data gaps, fragmented efforts, and uneven priorities.

To address these issues, UN-Habitat has launched the Quality of Life Initiative in collaboration with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and four United Nations Regional Commissions. This people-centered framework goes beyond GDP, enabling cities to measure, track and improve urban well-being by focusing on what matters to their residents.

Quality of Life Index

Central to the initiative is the creation of a dynamic Quality of Life Index, designed to give city leaders a comprehensive pulse check across nine key domains: basic services & mobility, culture & recreation, economy, education, environment, governance, health and wellbeing, housing, and social cohesion.

What makes the Index practical is its adaptability. It merges global benchmarks from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with local priorities identified by city stakeholders, enabling each municipality to develop a bespoke index that reflects its unique context, values and priorities. This evidence-based approach equips local authorities with timely insights to make targeted interventions and measure precise impact.

Our approach

For the Initiative to succeed, cities need reliable, locally relevant data. Yet in many urban areas, this data is either fragmented or entirely missing. The Quality of Life Index addresses these challenges by integrating with Africa’s expanding Voluntary Local Review (VLR) process - a city-led assessment that provides a structure for monitoring progress on the SDGs and fostering multi-stakeholder collaboration.

The Index transforms VLR data from a static repository into an actionable tool that provides local authorities with a deeper understanding of the lived realities in their cities and where improvements can be made. By connecting the Index with VLRs, the initiative enables local leaders to:

Strengthen local responses to the SDGs
Guide targeted investments and tailor urban policies to meet specific city needs
Monitor and evaluate urban interventions to ensure they genuinely improve residents' well-being

Quality of Life at ECA

In partnership with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is using the Quality of Life initiative to sensitize Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe to leverage data and policy insights in cities. Through lessons learned from localizing the Sustainable Development Goals and developing Voluntary Local Reviews, ECA’s Urbanization and Development Section is mapping how urbanization is affecting the quality of life in cities.

Backed by robust research, bespoke training and in-depth consultation, this collaboration follows a three-step process:

Collecting and analyzing data to assess how cities have localized and developed their Voluntary Local Reviews of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how their current policies impact the quality of life.
Using the gained insights to help city authorities develop data-driven roadmaps to turn SDGs into local action, with clear benchmarks and reporting systems
Supporting city authorities in making targeted interventions and measuring their direct impact on the lives of all residents