Sierra Leone has progressed upwards for the 5th consecutive year, moving from 110 in 2022 to 108 out of 180 countries surveyed in 2023 in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published on 30 January 2024.
The West African nation also increased its 2022 score from 34 to 35 in 2023, which is again above the sub-Saharan average, and the highest the country has ever recorded since the CPI rankings began. In five years consistently, Sierra Leone has moved 22 places upwards on the CPI, from 130 in 2017 to 108 in 2023.
The just-released CPI reveals that Sierra Leone continues to make remarkable progress in the World’s most respected corruption watchdog’s assessment and rankings and now leads 72 countries in the global campaign against corruption, including 31 African countries, among them are Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique, Niger, and Libya.
“This year’s CPI shows mixed results in Africa, with significant improvements in a few countries. However, most African countries experienced stagnation, maintaining the region’s consistently poor performance, with an unaltered regional average score of 33”.
Sierra Leone performed better than the Average Score in Sub-Saharan Africa for the fourth year and has consistently improved in the past four years.
The CPI is an annual survey used by TI, the leading global civil society watchdog on the global fight against corruption, to assess comparative perceived levels of public sector corruption in countries across the World.
It could also be recalled that Sierra Leone has been outstanding in its Score in the ‘Control of Corruption’ Indicator in the Millennium Challenge Corporation Scorecard, with consistently excellent scores above 70% in 6 consecutive years.
Similar exponential jumps have been recorded in other respected global corruption measurement institutions like Afrobarometer which confirmed that corruption prevalence has considerably reduced from 70% in 2015 to 40% in 2020, when the last survey was conducted.
