Nigeria records worst ranking in World Happiness index

Africa’s biggest economy has recorded the worst performance in the  2022 World Happiness Report, ranking 118 out of 146 countries.

The report which was released today, two days before the annual International Day of Happiness is issued annually by the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The report ranks nations based on factors such as personal sense of well-being, levels of GDP, life expectancy among others. The list, which is in its 10th year, assigns a score on a scale of 0-10, based on an average of data over three years.

Surveys ask respondents to indicate on a 1-10 scale how much social support they feel they have if something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt their society is, and how generous they are.

Further analysis shows that since the report started in 2012, the country ranked 82, 78, 103, 95, 91, 85, 115, 116 in the 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 ranking.

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It is no surprise as the country’s current realities such as high inflation, unemployment and fragile economic growth are not making people happy rather than miserable.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the country’s inflation, which measures the rate of increase of commodity prices, is 15.7 percent in February 2022, while unemployment is at a record high of 33.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020.

The report also highlighted that Finland retained its position as the world’s happiest place, while Mauritius, standing at 52 positions, is the happiest country in Africa. Libya is now the second happiest country in Africa, followed by Ivory Coast, South Africa, Gambia, and Algeria.