Ghana has improved her performance on the 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released by Transparency International (TI) with a score of 43 points out of a possible 100.
Ghana gained 2 points compared to its 2019 score of 41.
The country also exceeds the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) average of 32 points, and equalled the global average score of 43 points.
The score places Ghana in the 10th position in the SSA and 75 in the world ranking out of 180 countries included in this year’s index.
Seychelles ranked highest with 66 points followed by Botswana with 60, Cape Verde 58, Rwanda 54, and Mauritius 53 as the top five countries in the SSA.
Ghana also performed better than 39 other SSA countries including Benin, Lesotho, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia, etc.
Globally, Denmark and New Zealand topped with 88 points each. Syria, Somalia and South Sudan are at the bottom with 14, 12 and 12 points respectively.
The highest-scoring region is Western Europe and the European Union with an average score of 66, while the lowest scoring region is Sub-Saharan Africa with an average score of 32.
The 2020 CPI focuses on the relationship between corruption and emergency responses, which poses a critical threat to citizens’ lives and livelihoods, especially when combined with a public health emergency.
According to TI, the 2020 CPI reveals that persistent corruption is undermining health care systems and contributing to democratic backsliding amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Countries that perform well on the index, it says, invest more in health care and are better able to provide universal health coverage and are less likely to violate democratic norms and institutions or the rule of law.
The Index shows that 80% of the countries that have significantly improved their CPI scores since 2012 also have the percentage of their health expenditure to GDP above five per cent (5%).
Incidentally, Ghana’s average health expenditure to GDP between 2000 and 2018 shows that the nine SSA countries that performed better in the 2020 CPI spend higher on health between 9.5 – 4.0 per cent to GDP as compared to Ghana’s 3.9 per cent of GDP.
The 2020 CPI by Transparency International scores and ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption.
It draws upon 13 data sources that capture the assessment of experts and business executives on a number of corrupt behaviours in the public sector using a scale of zero, denoting highly corrupt to 100, which denotes very clean.
