Ibrahim Index of African Governance

“We are shining a light on governance in Africa, and in so doing we are making a unique contribution to improving the quality of governance. The Ibrahim Index is a tool to hold governments to account and frame the debate about how we are governed. Africans are setting benchmarks not only for their own continent, but for the world. ” Mo Ibrahim

The Ibrahim Index of African Governance has been created in recognition of the need for a more objective and quantifiable method of measuring governance in the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The Ibrahim Index provides both a new definition of governance, as well as a comprehensive set of governance measures. Based on five categories of essential political goods, each country is assessed against 58 individual measures, capturing clear, objective outcomes.

Safety and Security
Rule of Law, Transparency and Corruption
Participation and Human Rights
Sustainable Economic Development
Human Development

Key features of the Ibrahim Index include:
Comprehensiveness – the large number of measures included in the Ibrahim Index makes it one of the most comprehensive assessments of the governance in sub-Saharan African ever undertaken. Focus on political goods – the Ibrahim Index uniquely defines governance as the delivery of key political goods, capturing defined, measurable outcomes rather than subjective assessments.

Geographical coverage – the Ibrahim Index examines all 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa for three years (and hereafter annually), making it among the most complete and up-to-date indexes ever compiled.

Ranking – The Ibrahim Index is the first such attempt to explicitly rank sub-Saharan African countries according to governance quality.

Progressiveness - the Ibrahim Index will be expanded and refined on an annual basis, offering a continually improving assessment of governance.

On the website you can explore the full data set for the 2007 Ibrahim Index (using a dataset from the year 2005) and retrospective data sets for 2002 and 2000. You will also find a number of papers on benchmarking governance.

Browsers on low-bandwidth connections can access a text only version of the website.

The Ibrahim Index is a project of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and has been developed under the direction of Robert I. Rotberg and Rachel Gisselquist of the Kennedy school of Government at Harvard University.

The Foundation welcomes your feedback on this project, which can be submitted via this website