Sub-Saharan Africa has seen alarming increases in security issues in recent years, which has imposed significant fiscal strains on governments, and negatively impacted economic stability and sustainable development. The study analyzed the effect of security expenditure on economic growth in 45 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 2000–2024 with the help of Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (Panel ARDL) model. The model reflects the dynamic short-run and long-run characteristics of the security-expenditure/economic-growth relationship and includes control variables, including gross fixed capital formation, institutional quality, and trade openness. The empirical results confirm that both short-term and long-term security spending have a positive and statistically significant impact on economic growth, indicating that improving the security situation leads to political stability, greater investor confidence and enables productive economic activities. The positive and significant long-run impact on economic growth is also supported by the gross fixed capital formation, which illustrates the importance of infrastructure development and capital investment in supporting economic growth. In contrast, the quality of institutions is negatively related to economic growth, suggesting that poor governance remains a major constraint on economic development in the region and will require sustained efforts to address it, particularly by tackling corruption, weak institutions, and poor regulatory systems. Moreover, the positive and significant relationship found between trade openness and economic growth further supports the positive impacts of more openness to the global economy via trade and investment. The study suggests that balanced policy mix of providing adequate security investment along with thorough institutional reforms and improved trade integration is needed to ensure sustainable economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. It thus calls for greater governance, greater transparency and accountability in security spending, greater institutional effectiveness, and the greater integration of regional and international trade to ensure long-term economic stability, inclusive growth and sustainable development.

Keywords: Security Expenditure, Economic Growth, Sub-Saharan Africa, Institutional Quality, Trade Openness, Gross Fixed Capital Formation, Panel ARDL Model, Sustainable Development.