Ghanaians are 7th happiest in Africa, 95th in the world

Ghana scored 5,088 out of 10 possible points.

Ghana ranked 7th in Africa in the 2020 edition of the World Happiness Report 2021, but 95th globally out of a table of 149 countries.

The report largely focused on the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the lives of people across the world. Ghana scored 5,088 out of 10 possible points.

Ghana came behind Mauritius, Libya, Congo Brazzaville, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Senegal, the report notes. Ghana was sandwiched between Senegal and Niger.

The current report is the ninth since the first and the results cover the period from 2018 to 2020.

“Although reports on world happiness are based on a wide variety of data, the most important source has always been the Gallup World Poll, which is unique in the range and comparability of its global series of annual surveys. “, said the authors.

Some of the areas examined by the current authors were: life under COVID-19; Happiness, confidence and death from COVID-19; Prevalence and Well-Being of COVID-19: Lessons from East Asia and Reasons for Asia-Pacific’s Success in COVID-19 Suppression.

Other areas included: mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic; Social connection and well-being during COVID-19 and 7 Work and well-being during COVID-19: impact, inequalities, resilience and the future of work.

The happiest countries in Africa are listed below in descending order with their global scores:

50. Mauritius
80. Libya
83. Congo (Brazzaville)
85. Ivory Coast
91. Cameroon
92. Senegal
95. Ghana
96. Niger
99. Benin
98. Gambia

The 10 happiest countries in the world are listed below

1. Finland (7,842)
2. Denmark (7,620)
3. Switzerland (7,571)
4. Iceland (7,554)
5. Netherlands (7.464)
6. Norway (7,392)
7. Sweden (7.363)
8. Luxembourg (7.324) *
9. New Zealand (7,277)
10. Austria (7,268)

The least happy countries in the world included Lesotho, Botswana, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. Afghanistan was last on the list.

The authors recorded “a significantly higher frequency of negative emotions” in just over a third of the countries. The authors noted that most of the negative emotions were likely caused by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Finland “ranked very high on mutual confidence building measures that have helped protect lives and livelihoods during the pandemic,” the authors said.

The Nordic nation of 5.5 million people handled the pandemic much better than most European countries during the pandemic, with just over 70,000 cases and 805 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.