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About

The Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) is a tool that measures and monitors governance performance in African countries.

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation (MIF) defines governance as:

the provision of political, social, economic and environmental public goods and services that every citizen has the right to expect from their government, and that a government has the responsibility to deliver to its citizens.

Country Performance

In the IIAG, country performance in delivering governance is measured across four key components that effectively provide indicators of a country's 'Overall Governance' performance.

The key components that form the four categories of the IIAG as described in the diagram below are: Safety & Rule of Law, Participation & Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human Development. Each of these categories contain sub-categories under which we have organised various indicators that provide quantifiable measures of the overarching dimensions of governance. In total, the 2022 IIAG contains 81 indicators.

IIAG Overview IIAG Overview

Measuring African governance

Published since 2007, the IIAG was created to provide a quantifiable tool to measure and monitor governance performance in African countries, to assess their progress over time and to support the development of effective and responsive policy solutions. The IIAG focusses on measuring outputs and outcomes of policy, rather than declarations of intent, de jure statutes and levels of expenditure.

47 independent sources

The 2022 IIAG provides data measuring the governance performance across all the dimensions described above for all 54 African countries for the years from 2012-2021. In order to provide a broad, documented and impartial picture of governance performance in every African country, the indicators used to measure governance in Africa are collected from 47 independent sources.

A revised framework

Since 2007, both the data and governance landscapes have evolved immensely. To take into account those changes, a thorough review of the IIAG was conducted between 2018 and 2020, providing a completely re-worked framework for the 2020 IIAG and successive iterations at both conceptual and methodological levels.

Citizens Voices

Highlighting Africa’s Citizens’ Voices

As citizens are the recipients of public leadership and governance, the assessment of governance performance needs to be rooted on results for citizens and cannot rely on official and expert assessment data alone.

Since the IIAG's inception, MIF has been working with and supporting Afrobarometer, the leading pan-African research institution conducting public attitude surveys on the continent. For this reason, the IIAG dataset is accompanied by a complementary Afrobarometer-sourced Citizens’ Voices dataset. The structure of Citizens’ Voices mirrors the IIAG categories and provides public perception data on the closest proxies to the IIAG measures, becoming a key reference section of the IIAG to allow contextualisation of the results in the reality on the ground as perceived by citizens. However, it is important to note that these scores do not form part of the calculation for Overall Governance.

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation is fully transparent. We publish all country scores, full details and all information regarding the construction of the IIAG is available on our website.

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    • Public Perception of Overall Governance

    About Citizens’ Voices

    As citizens are the recipients of public leadership and governance, the assessment of governance performance of the IIAG is accompanied by the Citizens’ Voices dataset in an effort to contextualise the official and expert assessment data in the IIAG with the reality on the ground as perceived by citizens.

    MIF has been working with and supporting Afrobarometer, the leading pan-African research institution conducting public opinion surveys on the continent, and the 2022 IIAG framework gives these more prominence. Formerly scattered at various levels in the IIAG, citizens’ assessments of various governance components are now highlighted in a Citizens’ Voices section, providing a comprehensive 'reality check' to complement the IIAG results.

    This section mirrors the IIAG categories and provides public perception data on the closest proxies to the IIAG measures. However, whilst these measures are available to compare across the IIAG, it is important to note that their scores do not form part of the calculation for Overall Governance.

    About Quick Selection

    Use these links to quickly select multiple measures at once.

    Please note that this will not select any measures from the Citizens’ Voices section. To add those, simply scroll down to Public Perception of Overall Governance and use the quick select options there.