Understanding the Efficiency in Generating Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Two-Stage Network DEA Approach

One of the primary goals of any nation is to improve the level of human development, which entails higher levels of education, health, and income. However, considering the holistic human development system, previous studies in Africa have neglected to assess the system’s performance while considering the inefficiency within internal structures (i.e., economic growth, health promotion, and education promotion). Accordingly, this study proposes a new methodological framework consisting of a new two-stage network DEA model, combined with rank-sum tests and the concept of efficiency Theil coefficient and its corresponding decomposition method to address this research gap. The proposed framework can obtain multi-dimensional efficiency scores of the human development system, examine heterogeneity between research groups, measure efficiency inequality across countries, and identify impediments to technology diffusion. Empirically, this study focuses on 26 sub-Saharan African countries from 2014 to 2018 due to the numerous development challenges of the region. Our results show that, first, sub-Saharan Africa failed to improve the overall performance of the human development system during the study period. However, two divisions (i.e., economic growth and education promotion divisions) improved efficiency during the study period, while the health promotion division showed a decreasing trend. Second, the education promotion division appears as the primary source of the system's inefficiency, while its positive growth rate indicates that efforts have been made to promote education. However, the low-efficiency level across three divisions suggests that all divisions should be prioritized to improve the system's overall performance. Finally, there is heterogeneity across countries and research groups regarding efficiency measures, and cross-group inequity is the main factor producing technology inequality. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.