The Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), established in 2007, provides an assessment of the quality of governance in African countries. The IIAG is compiled by 81 indicators and 265 variables from 54 data projects, coming from 47 independent African and international data sources. Published every two years, the IIAG is one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of data on African governance. The IIAG provides a framework for citizens, governments, institutions, academics and business to assess the delivery of public goods and services, and policy outcomes, across Africa. The Foundation defines governance as the provision of the political, social, economic and environmental goods that a citizen has the right to expect from their state, and that a state has the responsibility to deliver to its citizens. The IIAG assesses progress under four main conceptual categories: Security & Rule of Law, Participation, Rights & Inclusion, Foundations for Economic Opportunity, and Human Development. Scholars, development professionals, analysts, and policymakers have used the IIAG to benchmark governance performance across a number of dimensions at national, regional and continental levels. Scores and ranks are available for the latest 10-year period, enabling the analysis of trends over time. All underlying data used in the construction of the IIAG is freely available and transparently published alongside a comprehensive methodology.
History The Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) is a key initiative of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation that was first published in 2007. The most recent iteration, the 2022 IIAG, was published in January 2023 and covers the period 2012-2021. The index was initially produced in association with Harvard University; academic and technical assistance has subsequently been provided by a range of African academics and research bodies. The IIAG is published every two years and receives extensive media attention from across the African continent and in the international media. The Ibrahim Index has been used by civil society and government bodies across the continent to monitor governance. One example is in, where political opponents of President Uhuru Kenyatta used the 2022 IIAG to challenge his administration’s record on governance. In 2007, critics suggested that the IIAG was limited by its focus on the 48 Sub-Saharan African countries, ignoring Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Aside from these five additions, the IIAG first included South Sudan, which became a separate country in 2011, in its 2015 iteration.
Methodology The Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) is a composite Index that is published every two years and provides a statistical measure of governance performance in 54 African countries. The IIAG governance framework comprises four dimensions (categories):
Security & Rule of Law Participation, Rights & Inclusion Foundations for Economic Opportunity Human Development These categories are made up of 16 sub-categories, consisting of 81 indicators. For the latest IIAG, 265 variables have been collected from 47 independent sources. The IIAG is refined and revised on a biannual basis to continually improve its measurement of governance. Improvements are a result of either methodological changes, or based on the inclusion of new data. Equally, if previously included measures undergo fundamental methodological changes or do not meet the criteria for inclusion anymore, it may be necessary to exclude them from future iterations. It is also necessary to update previously published data if retrospective revisions are made to data at source. As a result of these changes, the entire IIAG dataset is re-calculated with each new iteration, in accordance with best practices. The retrospective revision means that score and rank comparisons between years should be made entirely within the latest available IIAG iteration. Ahead of the 2020 IIAG, the structure of the Index was changed so that the vast majority of indicators are now composed of more than one single variable collected from source. This is based on the understanding that composite scores constitute the key value added of the IIAG dataset, and aims to provide a clearer, more complete and more stable framework. Furthermore, since the 2020 iteration, the IIAG is also accompanied by the Citizens’ Voices dataset. All variables collected for this complementary dataset are sourced from Afrobarometer, the leading pan-African research institution conducting public opinion surveys. Even though Citizens’ Voices is calculated as a separate index and its scores are not counted in the calculation of IIAG scores, this dataset mirrors the IIAG framework and helps contextualise the official and expert assessment data in the IIAG with the reality on the ground as perceived by citizens.
How to read the results The IIAG provides score, rank and 10-year trends for all governance measures included in the dataset, and these are available for each country, as well as for multinational groupings such as the continent, African geographical regions and Regional Economic Communities (RECs).
Scores Each governance measure is given a score out of 100.0 to quantify a country’s performance for each data year. Scores are rounded to one decimal point and show each country’s performance in relation to the other 54 African countries.
Ranks The 54 countries represented in the IIAG are ranked for each governance measure based on their respective scores and countries are sorted by performance. If two or more countries share the same score, they are given the same place in the ranking table.
10-year trends 10-year trends offer additional insights into the scores and ranks by showing the change in score between the last and the first data years of the given period. For example, the 2022 IIAG 10-year trends compare each country’s performance for each governance measure in 2021 and 2012.
Indicators The latest IIAG comprises 81 indicators, grouped into four broad categories: Security & Rule of Law, Participation, Rights & Inclusion, Foundations for Economic Opportunity, and Human Development. The Overall Governance score is arrived at by calculating the unweighted average of the four IIAG categories.
Security and Rule of Law
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