- The World Happiness Report ranked countries based on six factors with a 95 per cent confidence.
- These are GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption.
Image: FILE
Kenya has dropped three slots in the World Happiness index to position 114 as Finland retained the top spot for the seventh year running.
Kenya was ranked position 111 in 2023 up from 119 in 2022.
The World Happiness Report ranked countries based on six factors with a 95 per cent confidence on GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption.
Overall, Kenya had an average life evaluation score of 4.470 compared to Finland’s 7.471.
The country faired better than her neighbours Uganda in position 117 with a 4.372 score while Tanzania was ranked 131 with a score of 3.781.
The World Happiness Report was compiled based on data from the Gallup World Poll and the Gallup/Meta State of Social Connections study.
Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country and are asked to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the worst possible as a 0.
Positive emotions: Positive affect is given by the average of individual yes or no answers about three emotions: laughter, enjoyment, and interest.
Negative emotions: Negative affect is given by the average of individual yes or no answers about three emotions: worry, sadness, and anger.
"Weights are used to construct population-representative national averages for each year in each country," the reports said.
Kenya scored 1.037 on the evaluation of GDP per capita, 0.895 on social support, 0.353 on healthy life expectancy, 0.519 on freedom to make life choices, 0.282 on generosity and 0.069 on perceptions of corruption.
The top 10 countries have remained much the same since before COVID with Denmark following closely behind leader Finland although the United States and Germany fell off the top 20 list to positions 23 and 24 respectively.
Afghanistan remained the world’s lowest-ranked country in happiness followed by Lebanon, Lesotho, Sierra Leone and Congo, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, Eswatini, Zambia, Yemen and Comoros.
“Countries are ranked according to their self-assessed life evaluations averaged over the years 2021-2023. Scores are based on individuals’ assessments of their lives,” the report said.
“There is still a lot of year-to-year consistency in the way people rate their lives in different countries, and since our rankings are based on a three-year average there is information carried forward from one year to the next.”
World’s 20 happiest countries in 2024
- 1. Finland
- 2. Denmark
- 3. Iceland
- 4. Sweden
- 5. Israel
- 6. Netherlands
- 7. Norway
- 8. Luxembourg
- 9. Switzerland
- 10. Australia
- 11. New Zealand
- 12. Costa Rica
- 13. Kuwait
- 14. Austria
- 15. Canada
- 16. Belgium
- 17. Ireland
- 18. Czechia
- 19. Lithuania
- 20. United Kingdom