For the akanyal brigade, here’s the story…
NEW YORK, Thursday
Somalis are happier than Kenyans, in spite of having endured war for more than two decades, a new report shows.
Ranked at 76 globally in the 2015 World Happiness Report released by the United Nations on Thursday, Somalia is the happiest country in the region, followed by Kenya at 122.
However, the report also includes Somaliland territory, which is ranked at 97 out of the 157 countries.
The study becomes more interesting because, at 143, East African Community’s latest entrant South Sudan outperformed Tanzania (149), Rwanda (152) and Burundi (157).
However, the rankings tell half the story. Although Kenya has gained 4.3 points since the last report, Kenyans are generally unhappy about the country’s gross domestic product, perception of corruption, low freedom in making life choices, low social support, healthy life expectancy and lack of generosity.
The country’s biggest score on the chart may have come from what researchers called ‘residual’ happiness.
The report, which compiled these factors between 2013 and 2015, may have come at a time when Kenyans were living with corruption scandals, Al-Shabaab attacks, allegations of tribalism, poverty and fatal road accidents, all which are assessed to determine average happiness.
IMAGINED HAPPINESS
Somalis, on the other hand, may be living with a daily bombardment by the Al-Shabaab, but those people have retained more happiness about their country.
The report does not assess Somalis’ happiness about GDP, which is fettered by war anyway.
And though they have little to say about their health and life expectancy, researchers found that their sense of generosity, social support and imagined happiness and residual liking makes them happier than any other country in the East African region.
Burundi is the least happy country in the world, followed by war-ravaged Syria and Togo.
Afghanistan and six other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa — Benin, Rwanda, Guinea, Liberia, Tanzania and Madagascar — are also among the least happy.
The report compared data from 2005 to 2015 showing that Greece, which suffered enormously from the global recession and now faces a crippling migrant crisis, had the highest drop in happiness. It seeks to quantify happiness as a means of making societies healthier and more efficient.
The UN published the first such study in 2012.
NORDIC COUNTRIES HAPPIEST
As with last year, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden round out the top 10, making small or medium-sized countries in Western Europe seven of the top 10 happiest countries.
Denmark, which was ranked first in the 2012 and 2013 reports but lost that honour to Switzerland in last year’s, reclaimed its title.
The United States, where sharp polarisation has been exposed in the 2016 presidential election campaign, out-ranked several Western European countries to be 13th, up two spots from last year. Germany was 16th, Britain 23rd and France 32nd in the happiness ranking.
China, the world’s most populous country, was ranked 83rd and India, the world’s largest democracy, came in at 118 while a string of Middle Eastern kingdoms — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain — out-ranked Italy, which came in at number 50, and Japan (53).
The authors said “six factors — GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, social freedom, generosity and absence of corruption …blah blah. .