Claim: Ghana has been ranked 6th in 2021 world ranking of most corrupt countries.
Ghana did not rank 6th in the 2021 report. The said ranking was rather from a 2018 report by the US And World Report.
Full Text
A story by the news website reportghana.com sighted by Dubawa Ghana claims Ghana placed 6th in a 2021 report that ranked the most corrupt countries in the world.
“JUST IN: Most Corrupt Countries 2021 , Ghana takes the sixth position,” the headline of the report reads.
The body of the story itself details the country’s performance on corruption for instance as reported by the Corruption Perception Index.
Verification
Dubawa found that unlike the story’s headline that the report is that of 2021, the author rather used the 2018 report from the organization, US News & World Report as their source.
The last but one paragraph of the article reads,
“The top 10 most corrupt nations, according to the 2018 U.S. News & World Report rankings, are…”
This was proof that the said report was commissioned in 2018 and not 2021 as suggested in the claim.
In order to set the records straight, Dubawa accessed the reports from 2018 and 2021 to verify this claim.
The 2018 report recovered from the news site source, US News & World Report, showed that Ghana placed 71st out of countries ranked as ‘Best Countries’ in 2018 and placed 6th in the ‘Most Corrupt Countries’ section.
The report scored in the areas of Entrepreneurship, Adventure, Citizenship, Cultural, Influence, Heritage, Movers, Open for Business, Power and Quality of Life.
In the 2021 report however, Ghana was not part of the countries listed.
The US News & World Report Rankings
The report by the United States based news agency, US News, provides a list of survey rankings for countries in various areas.
Various surveys are organized to arrive at conclusions based on perceptions on issues. This includes their ‘Best Countries Ranking’ report which describes 78 countries (the present report) based “on a survey of more than 17,000 global citizens”.
This characterization, which includes countries that are transparent and best to invest in, tries to conclude on which countries are best. Countries that fall at the bottom of the rankings pass as the most corrupt.
Countries that made the top of this year’s rankings include Denmark, Canada and Germany; presented as the most transparent.
Iraq passed as the most corrupt country as they say at the bottom of this year’s list. Other countries include Azerbaijan, El Salvador, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, Guatemala, Russi, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
Conclusion
The claim that Ghana placed 6th in 2021 in the report is totally wrong as the country that took the 6th position was the South-American country, Guatemala. It is a case of a misleading headline which does not match the content of the story.
Only four African countries, Egypt, Morocco, Kenya and South Africa are included.
This report was produced under the Dubawa Student Fact-checking Project aimed at offering students in tertiary schools aspiring to take up roles in the profession the opportunity to acquire real-world experience through verification and fact-checking.
