The Ibrahim Index provides a comprehensive ranking of African countries according to governance quality

The Ibrahim Index of African Governance is a comprehensive ranking of African countries according to governance quality. Funded and led by an African institution, the Ibrahim Index aims to be Africa’s leading assessment of governance that informs and empowers citizens to hold their governments and public institutions to account. Thus we hope to stimulate debate in a constructive way and establish a framework for good governance in Africa.

The Ibrahim Index measures the delivery of public goods and services to citizens by government and non-state actors. The Ibrahim Index uses indicators across four main pillars: Safety and Rule of Law; Participation and Human Rights; Sustainable Economic Opportunity; and Human Development as proxies for the quality of the processes and outcomes of governance.

The Ibrahim Index assesses governance against 84 criteria, making it the most comprehensive collection of qualitative and quantitative data that measures governance in Africa. The criteria are divided into four main categories and 13 sub-categories. The indicators that make up the sub-categories are based either on official data (OD) or expert assessment (EA).

The full structure of the 2009 Ibrahim Index

In keeping with our commitment to ensure that the index is continually improved over time and can be used by civil society, this project has been strengthened in significant ways this year. The 2009 Ibrahim Index¹ includes new indicators more regularly updated, and therefore more immediately reflective of current reality. Our index has also been extended this year to consider the entire continent, not just the sub-Saharan region, following consultation with stakeholders and in consideration of the geographic and political links between all African countries.

In addition, the Ibrahim Index will be compiled in partnership with African academics and researchers. Already, experts from various African institutions including: Afrobarometer, the American University in Cairo, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA – in Senegal), and the Institut de Recherche Empirique en Economie Politique (IREEP- in Benin) support the Foundation’s research team. These experts sit on the Academic Advisory Council and Technical Committee, whose work is overseen by the Foundation’s Director of Research, Dr Hania Farhan.

We are deeply committed to this partnership with institutions on the continent and to developing capacity within them so that in the years to come they will be full partners in the compilation of the Ibrahim Index. This is part of our commitment to further entrench the continent’s ownership of governance issues and to improve the quality and availability of data².

The lack of sufficiently robust and comprehensive data to assess African progress is striking in all the components of the index. This unavailability of data has led us to exclude a number of indicators, particularly those that assess poverty and vital aspects of health service delivery, which are major issues for developing countries. This is a pragmatic choice and finding strong poverty and health indicators in future years will be a core priority for us.

We will continue to work in this direction, so that, in the years to come, the Ibrahim Index will be unconstrained by data issues and fully reflective of African priorities in the assessment of government performance.

1. The 2007 and 2008 Ibrahim Indexes were created and prepared under the auspices of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government’s Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution under the direction of Professor Robert Rotberg and Dr Rachel Gisselquist. We continue to welcome their contributions to the debate on governance in Africa.
2. The 2009 Ibrahim Index of African Governance is based on the latest available data for each indicator; this data is from either 2007 or 2008. Previous years' indices are calculated using the latest data that would have been available that year.