By Omar Bah
The Gallup Global Emotions 2024 Report has ranked The Gambia as one of the countries with the least negative experiences (stress) in its latest measurements of people’s positive and negative daily experiences.
Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles — feelings and emotions — that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture.
Each index provides a real-time snapshot of people’s daily experiences, offering leaders insights into the health of their societies that they cannot gather from economic measures alone.
The Gambia (down 15 points) and Eswatini (down 11 points), saw double-digit declines in stress.
The findings are based on nearly 146,000 interviews with adults in 142 countries and areas in 2023.
Among the top 10 countries with the highest negative experiences(stress) worldwide, more than half were from sub-Saharan Africa.
Guinea Conakry leads the World on Negative Emotion(stress).
Following Guinea are Chad, scoring second highest on the index with a 51, Sierra Leone (50) and Democratic Republic of the Congo (49), with Liberia (47) and Benin and Comoros (both 45) further down the list.
Guinea, which continues to grapple with uncertainty after a military coup in 2021, scored the highest in the world on the index in 2023 with a 53. Majorities in Guinea were sad, stressed, worried and in pain. Stress skyrocketed to record levels, rising 10 points between 2022 and 2023.
Senegal was the sole African country with highest positive emotions. More than three in four Senegalese said they experienced enjoyment during a lot of the previous day. About nine in 10 people in Senegal reported smiling or laughing a lot during the previous day and seven in 10 reported feeling well-rested. More than nine in 10 reported feeling treated with respect.
On a global level, Gallup’s Negative Experience Index declined for the first time since 2014.
All five negative emotions that make up the index fell between 2022 and 2023, but stress levels dropped the most. Thirty-seven percent of the world felt stressed in 2023, down three percentage points from the previous year, but notably remaining well above where it was a decade ago (33%) and the years before that.
The Positive Experience Index is a measure of experienced wellbeing on the day before the survey. Questions provide a real-time measure of respondents’ positive experiences. It is based on people’s responses to five questions about positive experiences they had the day before the survey.
Senegalese ranked No. 1 on this measure, with 79% in 2023 saying they learned or did something interesting, like the 77% who said so in 2022.
