The 13th Edition of the Global Peace Index which ranks 163 independent states and territories according to the level of peacefulness has ranked Sierra Leone 52 out of the 163 rated countries in the World.
Sierra Leone according to the report dropped eighteen (18) places down scoring 1.822 from the 2018 report.
Ghana, Botswana and Zambia were rated ahead of the West African country in the entire continent.
Sierra Leone was separately ranked sixth in sub-saharan Africa ahead of Mauritius, Bostwana, Malawi, Ghana and Zambia.
The Global Peace Index Report produced by the institute for Economics and Peace is the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness.
The International Peace Index has had favourable ratings for the West African country in the last ten years ranking it as the third most peaceful in the West Africa.
The 2019 Report had disclosed that the average level of global peacefulness has improved slightly for the first time in five years on the 2019 index.
The average country score improved by 0.09% from the 2018 report.
The middle East and North Africa according to the Report remained the world’s least peaceful region.
It is home to four of the ten peaceful countries in the world, the report states.
Europe according to the report remains the most peaceful region in the world recording a very slight improvement in peacefulness after several years of deterioration.
Twenty-two of the 36 European countries recorded improvements on the 2019 Report with marked improvements.
Peacefulness improved on average on both the Safety and Security and Militarization domains, with a small deterioration on the Ongoing Conflict domain.
The global economic impact of violence improved for the first time since 2012, decreasing by 3.3 per cent or $475 billion from 2017 to 2018.
It stood at $14.1 trillion PPP in 2018, equivalent to 11.2 per cent of global GDP or $1,853 per person.
The improvement is largely due according to the report to the decrease in the impact of Armed Conflict particularly in Iraq, Colombia and Ukraine, where the impact of Armed Conflict decreased by 29 per cent to $672 billion in 2017.
The International Peace Index Report had also noted that despite this improvement, the world remains considerably less peaceful now than a decade ago, with the average level of peacefulness deteriorating by 3.78 per cent since
The fall in peacefulness over the past decade was caused by a wide range of factors, including increased terrorist activity,the intensification of conflicts in the Middle East, rising regional tensions in Eastern Europe and northeast Asia, and increasing numbers of refugees and heightened political tensions in Europe and the US.