Nigeria drops point, ranks 116th on World Happiness Index

NIGERIA has continued its steady fall on the ranking of the World Happiness Index as the nation is ranked 116th among 146 countries in 2021.

According to World Happiness Report 2021 released yesterday by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Nigeria was a point worse than it was in 2020, The report noted that Nigeria  dropped 38 points in six years.

It said Finland, Denmark and Switzerland were the top three happiest countries, while Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan were the least happiest countries.

The report ranked Libya as the happiest in Africa and 80th globally, while Nigeria’s neighbours, Ghana, Niger and Benin, ranked 95th, 96th and 99th in the world, respectively.

From the previous reports by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Nigeria ranked 11th in 2020, 85th in 2019, 91th in 2018 and 95th in 2017.

The UN report, however, said the coronavirus pandemic led to “only modest changes in the overall rankings, reflecting both the global nature of the pandemic and a widely shared resilience in the face of it”.

“For all our measures of subjective well-being and their main determinants, there are some countries with significant improvements and others where life has gotten worse.

“This ninth World Happiness Report is unlike any that have come before. COVID-19 has shaken, taken, and reshaped lives everywhere. In this chapter, our central purpose remains just what it has always been – to measure and use subjective well-being to track and explain the quality of lives all over the globe,” the report read in part.

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 149 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.

The annual report ranks nations based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy and the opinions of residents.
 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.

The World Happiness Report 2021 focuses on the effects of Covid-19 and how people all over the world have fared.