Introduction

Ibrahim Index briefing note (PDF)

All citizens of all countries desire to be governed well. That is what citizens want from the nation-states in which they live. Thus, nation-states in the modern world are responsible for the delivery of essential political goods to their inhabitants. That is their purpose, and has been their central legitimate justification since at least the seventeenth century. The essential political goods can be summarized and gathered under five categories: Safety and Security; Rule of Law, Transparency, and Corruption; Participation and Human Rights; Sustainable Economic Opportunity; and Human Development. Together, these five categories of political goods epitomize the performance of any government, at any level. No one, whether looking to her village, municipality, province, state, or nation, willingly wants to be victimized by crime or to live in a society without laws, freedom, the chance to prosper, or access to decent schools, well-run hospitals, and well-maintained roads.

The Ibrahim Index measures the degree to which each of these political goods is provided within the forty-eight African countries south of the Sahara. By comprehensively measuring the performance of government in this manner, that is, by measuring governance, the Index is able to offer a report card on the accomplishments of each government for the years being investigated — 2000 and 2002 (for baseline indications) and 2005 (the last year with reasonably complete available data for nearly all sub-Saharan African nation-states). In future, the Index will be updated annually. After a few years, preferably five in the first instance, the Index will be able to demonstrate how each of the forty-eight countries has shown progress or has slipped backward.

This Index provides more than an overall ranking of countries. Within each of its five measurement categories, separate evaluations and report cards concerning the attainments of each of the forty-eight countries within each category are offered. Further, within each category there are sub-categories, which can again be compared, country against country. Under each sub-category are additional sub-sub-categories. The Index is, therefore, composed of fifty-eight separate markers capturing the performance of individual countries.

For example, Security is divided into two sub-categories. One is National Security — the degree to which a national government holds an internal monopoly on the use of force and no insurgent groups threaten that monopoly. All forty-eight countries can be compared, for example, according to National Security by showing their casualty numbers in civil wars. Roads per square kilometer is another example of a result that is capable of being arrayed across all nation-states, this time as one of the measurement areas (a sub-sub-category) within Arteries of Commerce, a sub-category under Sustainable Economic Opportunity.

This method of measuring performance, as expressed meticulously in the Index, is explicitly diagnostic. It permits citizens (and civil society), country by country, to appreciate how the attainments of their governments compare to neighboring and other African governments. It permits governing authorities to make the same comparisons. In each, the numbers enable citizens, government, donors, and international organizations to visualize the areas specified on the country report cards that need improvement or at least more attention. If crime rates, for example, reduce a nation-state’s score on the Security indicator, then enhancing Public Safety would be wise.

The makers of this first Index also note the lack of timely information available for assessing some important areas of governance — information that is either not collected regularly at all, or, for some reason, is not made available to the public by the nation states themselves.

In selecting measures of governance, the Index strives for transparency and simplicity. Thus, unlike others, it is not based exclusively on perceptions or the judgments of experts. Such data are often difficult to verify against any standard metric, and reasonable people may differ markedly in their perceptions and judgments. Instead, insofar as possible in this first compilation, the Index reflects objective data—the hard numbers available on each country. Moreover, the Index measures outcomes, not inputs. That is, it asks under each heading: What has a government achieved? How well has it performed? It does not measure good intentions or official financial budgetary promises—both inputs that may or may not result in appropriate performance. In other words, it does not concern the Index if a nation is spending high or low levels of budgeted outlays on, say, health services. The Index prefers to know what results have come from those expenditures. Have citizens benefited? Have their health outcomes improved, as measured by maternal mortality rates or, say, access to clean water? The makers of the Index realize that the resource factor endowments of some African countries are less full than others. That is why economic growth rates are measured as well as annual average GDP per capita. That is why the Index provides more than single indicator assessments of the performance of African countries. And that is why the Index will be updated annually, to track changes over time.

Because this Index represents a methodological departure from other attempts to measure governance, especially for Africa, and because it contains so many entries and embodies so much conceptual complexity, the Index represents a work in progress. The makers of the Index hence will welcome all suggestions and constructive criticisms. The ultimate goal of the Index and the efforts of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, are to strengthen governance in Africa in order to improve the lives of Africans everywhere.

1. Indices and Governance - Robert I. Rotberg and Rachel Gisselquist
In this paper we compare the Ibrahim Index’s approach to defining and measuring good governance – based on the measurement of the delivery of key political goods - with other initiatives to benchmark governance.

2. Measurement, methods, and more - Robert I. Rotberg and Rachel Gisselquist
The Ibrahim Index uses a broad range of data for all forty-eight sub-Saharan African countries. The methods used to collate, measure and weigh data are described in this paper.