• Sub-Saharan Africa
• Analysis, scores and results
• African Peer Review Mechanism

Sub-Saharan Africa

Mo Ibrahim Foundation published a new index in September 2007 ranking the performance of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The Ibrahim Index grades countries on factors such as security, levels of corruption, and respect for human rights. This paper points out a number of limitations of this index.

The author says the Index encounters the same problems associated with other indexes such as weighting, scales, variance truncation, absolute versus relative scores, time and method disparities of raw data. The Index relies heavily on the existing global data sources and simply disaggregated them regionally for Africa.

The Ibrahim Index claims to provide a comprehensive definition of governance based on the delivery of key ‘political goods’ sorted in five categories: (i) Safety and security; (ii) Rule of law, transparency and corruption (iii) Participation and human rights (iv) Sustainable economic opportunity (v) human development. The assumption of the index is that governments, which can provide these five political goods, expressed in 58 subcategories, tend to be governed better than others. This definition, the authors says, is problematic for several reasons:.

• the rationale why this definition should prevail over other definitions is contested
• it focuses on results rather than processes and does overlook that processes are equally important for good governance than the results
• the definition is objectivistic and doesn't take perception into account. Critical observers might ask on whose authority such a definition can be declared as “comprehensive”
• the Index considers human development as a function of governance whereas Human development in the way that was originally introduced by UNDP, encompasses governance and is hence not a function of governance
• even if one agrees with the five political goods, the definitions of indicators can be questioned. For instance participation appears to be narrowly viewed only as participation in elections

The author, however, concludes that these comments should not lead to the conclusion that the Index is futile. But as with any other governance assessment, one has to be aware of its limitation and shortcomings in order to appreciate its value and use.

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