Impact of regional inequalities on sustainable development strategies in Africa: A systematic literature review analysis of economic, social, and environmental challenges

Abstract

Regional development remains a pressing political priority for valuing marginalized spaces and communities that sustain productive ecosystems. However, integrated analyses of Africa’s economic, social, and environmental disparities are critically lacking. This study bridges this gap by systematically reviewing 49 Web of Science-indexed works, combining bibliometric mapping with critical content analysis to decode structural inequalities. Methodologically, brings an innovative sense by intersecting sustainable development goals (SDG), driven thematic clusters such as climate adaptation and transformational poverty, with spatial-economic diagnostics, revealing how unemployment, low productivity, and weak specialization in African countries, exacerbate migration and ecological degradation, spreading inequalities. Theoretically, we demonstrate how emergent research prioritizes cross-disciplinary SDG frameworks yet often overlooks the role of grassroots agency in co-designing poverty-alleviation strategies. Key findings highlight the urgency of centering community-led environmental adaptation and scientific-policy synergies to address Africa’s development paradoxes. Our analysis advances contributions for aligning regional inequality studies with SDG implementation in low-resource contexts.