Ghana has once again been ranked the second most peaceful country in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 2022 Global Peace Index (GPI).
The country is ranked behind Mauritius and followed by The Gambia, Botswana and the rest of least other 39 African countries.
However, Ghana was also ranked the 40th most peaceful country in the world compared to it 38th position in the last year’s index published by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress.
The rankings see Ghana improve slightly with overall score on last year’s ranking which also placed the country as the second most peaceful African country.
Ghanaians has been urged to continue to maintain peace in the country.
Globally, Iceland remains the most peaceful country in the world, a position it has held since 2008.
It is trailed by New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Portugal and Slovenia in second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh place respectively.
Afghanistan is the least peaceful country, followed by Yemen, Syria, Russia and South Sudan.
Seven of the ten countries at the top of the GPI are in Europe, and Turkey is the only country in this region to be ranked outside the top half of the index.
The index ranks 163 independent states and territories according to their level of peacefulness.
Produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the GPI is the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness.
The GPI covers 99.7 per cent of the world’s population, using 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources, and measures the state of peace across three domains: the level of Societal Safety and Security, the extent of Ongoing Domestic and International Conflict, and the degree of Militarisation.
Lady year’s results show that the average level of global peacefulness deteriorated by 0.07 percent, compare to this year’s record of 0.03 percent.
This is the eleventh deterioration in peacefulness in the last fourteen years, with 90 countries improving, and 71 recording deteriorations with two remaining stable in peacefulness, highlighting that countries tends to deteriorate much faster than they improved.
Deaths from external conflicts recorded sharp deterioration driven from Russia invasion of Ukraine.
By Vincent Kubi