When people talk about Africa, they talk about it like one place. It is not. It is 54 countries, and they are not living the same reality. Some are calm. Some are at war. The 2025 Global Peace Index makes that gap impossible to ignore.
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Which African Countries Are Safest Which African Countries Are Safest
The 2025 Global Peace Index ranks Africa's safest countries. Mauritius leads, Sudan trails. See where each African nation sits and why.
The index comes out every June, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace. It scores 163 countries on conflict, militarisation, and safety, and the rule is simple: lower is better. A score under 1.6 means a country is very peaceful. A score above 3.0 means serious trouble. The index does not score every country in the world. In Africa, it covers 50 of the continent's 54 countries, leaving out smaller island nations like Cape Verde, Seychelles, Comoros, and São Tomé and Príncipe. No measure of peace is perfect, but this is the most trusted one we have, and it tells a clear story about Africa this year.
That story starts with Mauritius. The island scored 1.59 and ranked 26th in the world, holding its place as Africa's most peaceful country for the 18th year running. To put that in perspective, that is longer than many African presidents have stayed in power.
Behind Mauritius, the pattern continues. Botswana came next at 43rd globally, then Namibia at 50th. The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Ghana, Zambia, Senegal, and Liberia rounded out the top 10. None of these countries are wealthy in the way the world measures wealth, but they share something else: stable governments, working courts, and soldiers who stay in barracks. None of it sounds exciting. All of it is rare.
Move away from that group, and the picture changes fast. The trouble sits in two regions, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, and Sudan is now the worst of them. It ranks last on the continent with a score of 3.32, dragged down by a civil war that has displaced more than 11 million people since April 2023, according to the UN. Just behind Sudan come the Democratic Republic of Congo at 3.29, then South Sudan, Mali, and Burkina Faso.
What makes these numbers worse is that conflict does not stay where it starts. War in Mali pushes weapons and refugees into Burkina Faso and Niger. What began as a Malian problem is now a regional one, and the pressure does not stop at the Sahel's borders. It spills further south.
This is where Nigeria comes in. The country sits at 147th out of 163, weighed down by Boko Haram in the northeast, banditry in the northwest, and tension in the southeast. Its score worsened from 2.77 in 2024 to 2.87 in 2025, and last year alone it recorded 971 protests and violent demonstrations. Nigeria is not at war. But sitting at 147, it cannot honestly claim to be at peace either.
Step back from any single country and the picture is grim. Of the 50 African countries scored, 26 became less peaceful this year. Worldwide, peace is at its lowest point since the index began in 2008.
But the bigger lesson is in the gap between the top and the bottom. Mauritius is safer than France. Sudan is falling apart. Both of those facts come from the same continent, in the same year. That tells us peace in Africa is not about geography or fate. It is about choices. The countries at the top of the ranking are not richer or luckier than the ones at the bottom. They have done less exciting things, and done them consistently: held elections that actually change governments, built courts that actually work, and kept their armies out of politics. That is not glamorous. But it is what separates a country at 26th in the world from one at 147th.