Sky News Is Right About Ghana’s “World’s Poorest People” Tag, See Why
Uproar over Sky News description of Ghana as the “World’s Poorest People”, but has the media giant made a mistake or is the uproar just a misunderstanding
Tanitoluwa J. Adedotun 
Ghana received 600,000 AstraZeneca shots on Wednesday, 24th of February, 2021 and in doing so became the first country to receive the delivery of Covax coronavirus vaccines.
The arrival in Accra is the first batch shipped and delivered in Africa by the COVAX Facility as part of an unprecedented effort to make 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines available for delivery by the end of 2021.
In reporting the news, Sky News description of the event drew anger from Ghanaians as it seemed as if they referred to Ghanaians as the "worlds poorest people".
"A flight carrying 600,000 does of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine has arrived in Ghana as part of a global effort to immunise the world's poorest people"
In reality, Sky News has not made any unfair claims contrary to popular belief solely because of the way Ghana has received the vaccines.
Ghana has received the vaccines through the multilateral pact known as COVAX.
The programme is designed so that richer countries buying vaccines agree to help finance access for poorer nations, too.
It aims to reach up to 20% of the populations of poorer countries, at no cost to their governments.
Through the COVAX Facility – led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, WHO and CEPI – In collaboration with the PAHO Revolving Fund, UNICEF is leading the procurement and delivery for 92 low- and lower-middle-income countries while also supporting procurement for more than 97 upper-middle-income and high-income nations.
This means that Ghana has been placed in the region low and lower-middle-income; a category of the world's poorest people.
Sky News did not call Ghanaians "Worlds Poorest People", it only meant that Ghanaians falls into the category of the World's poorest people.
Commenting on Wednesday's first shipment, the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said it was a major first step but just the beginning.
"We will not end the pandemic anywhere unless we end it everywhere", he added.
Covax projects that it will deliver 2.3 billion doses by the year’s end — most of which will go to poorer countries, free of charge. High-income nations, however, have already snapped up twice that amount, according to a Duke University tracker.
“So far, 210 million doses of vaccine have been administered globally — but half of those are in just two countries,” WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday in Geneva. “More than 200 countries are yet to administer a single dose.”
Further deliveries are expected to neighbouring Ivory Coast later this week, the Covax alliance says.
Ghana has recorded more than 80,700 cases of coronavirus and 580 deaths since the pandemic began. These numbers are believed to fall short of the actual toll because of low levels of testing.
Though the vaccines are not generally intended for children, Unicef is involved in the scheme because of its expertise in procurement and the logistics of vaccine delivery.
Nana Kofi Quakyi, who is a health policy research fellow at New York University's School of Global Public Health, told the BBC that Ghana would still struggle to compete with wealthier nations to make up the shortfall in doses it needed to find, even with the Covax initiative.
"The challenge that countries like Ghana are having is that in an open market, our bargaining power for bilateral deals is just not competitive against other wealthier countries that... in some cases are buying more than they even need."
