Ranking African governments
A press release from the Mo Ibrahim Foundation touts its ranking of governments in sub-Saharan Africa.Mo Ibrahim Foundation Launches World's Most Comprehensive Ranking of African Governance
"Developed under the direction of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, with the help of an advisory council of African academics, the Ibrahim Index of African Governance assesses sub-Saharan Africa's 48 nation states against a comprehensive new index of governance indicators...
"Based on five categories of essential political goods, each country is assessed against 58 individual measures, capturing clear, objective outcomes...
"The founder and Chairman of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Dr. Mo Ibrahim, says:
"'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.'
"Key features of the Ibrahim Index include:
"1. 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.
"2. 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.
"3. 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.
"4. Ranking – The Ibrahim Index is the first such attempt to explicitly rank sub-Saharan African countries according to governance quality.
"5. Progressiveness - the Ibrahim Index will be expanded and refined on an annual basis, offering a continually improving assessment of governance."
The Daily Champion (Lagos) bemoans the fact that "Nigeria was conspicuously missing among the first 35 countries in a 48-nation survey of human development in Africa, analysed by Harvard University academics."
The article adds, "Self-acclaimed "Giant of Africa" Nigeria was listed in 37th position behind even Zimbabwe (31), Uganda (25) and Rwanda (18)."
While Nigeria is the only one of the AP6 included in the survey, perhaps you can create a learning opportunity by asking your students to apply the ranking process to the countries they are studying.
If you want to use the Ibrahim Index to evaluate other governments students are studying, go to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation website.
There you will find links to the details of the "five categories of essential political goods" that are used in ranking countries:
- Safety and Security
- Rule of Law, Transparency and Corruption
- Participation and Human Rights
- Sustainable Economic Development
- Human Development
It's obvious that students will not be able to do an expert job of finding criteria details for these categories, but the exercise can be informative about the difficulties of doing comparative government.
If small groups within the class each work on one country, the groups can present results of their research to the class. The rest of the class can then ask questions about their evaluations.
As a final exercise, the class can then rank the countries under study, or at least discuss possible rankings.
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:59 AM
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