In summary: Gbapolu County Senator Amara Konneh, in highlighting the appalling situation at the Liberia Electricity Corporation resulting in the scarcity of power supply by the entity, claimed that Liberia is the 8th poorest country in the world. We have verified this claim to be mostly correct.
Gbrapolu County Senator Amara Konneh, in a Facebook post on Sunday, February 18, said while going through the Roberts International Airport, there was no electricity and that all the flight systems and air conditioning units were down.
He revealed in the post that Liberians are suffering despite the low-hanging potential to change the country’s current position as the 8th poorest country in the world to alleviate some of the suffering the people are undergoing.
The Claim
In his own words: “Our people are suffering too much! We have the low-hanging potential to change our country’s current position as the 8th poorest country in the world to alleviate some of the suffering our people are undergoing”.
Rating Justification
To establish whether Liberia is the 8th poorest country in the world, our Fact-Checking Desk thoroughly searched data from the World Population Review on the poorest countries ranking in the world from a recent available data.
The world’s poorest countries are classified as low-income economies in the four-tiered World Bank ranking system.
This ranking, according to the World Bank is based on each country’s gross national income (GNI) per capita, which is a measure of the country’s total income divided by its population.
Accordingly, the 10 poorest countries in the world are Burundi, Central African Republic, South Sudan, DR Congo, Somalia, Mozambique, Niger, Liberia, Chad, and Afghanistan. This means Liberia is ranked as the 8th poorest nation in the world.
In addition, a 2024 Global Finance Data ranked Liberia 8th among the top 10 poorest countries in the world.
Global Finance is a monthly print magazine based in the United States, that helps corporate leaders, bankers and investors chart the course of global business and finance.
Meanwhile, a 2022 Mappr report also ranked Liberia 8th amongst the 20 poorest countries in the world.
Conclusion
Based on our findings, we conclude that the claim made by Gbapolu County Senator Amara Konneh that Liberia is the 8th poorest country in the world is correct.
Reports from the World Bank, Global Finance and Mappr ranked Liberia 8th amongst the poorest countries in the world based on their gross national income or purchasing power parity.