In 2012, Global Integrity embarked on a five-year collaboration with the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to generate the Africa Integrity Indicators (AII), which assesses key social, economic, political and anti-corruption mechanisms at the national level across all 54 African countries. That initial work has now been extended to continue our annual research process.
Both the breadth and depth of coverage are significant – producing detailed, evidence-based governance data across the entire continent, with scoring and detailed comments based on the expertise of in-country contributors, corroborated by multiple sources and reviewers.
Measuring both the existing legal framework and the “in practice” implementation is key in our effort to produce actionable governance data that help governments, citizens and civil society understand and evaluate the status quo and identify intervention points for subsequent reform efforts.
Our research is different from other assessments in that we work with more than 130 independent and country-based researchers and peer reviewers, often times journalists, who conduct original research and adhere to the following methodological benchmarks:
- Credibility through transparency: sources, comments, scores and indicator scoring criteria are fully transparent;
- Rigorous quality control: to ensure we produce fact-based (rather than perception or survey-based) data that is comparable across countries, we follow a rigorous double-blind peer-review process and apply various layers of quality control;
- Implementation gap: we assess legal frameworks and their in-practice effectiveness based on current examples, as regards issues ranging from the rule of law to the safeguarding of minority rights; and
- Actionability and entry points for reform: each indicator narrative can provide guidance to stakeholders on potential areas of reform and allows for nuances and country-specific context to be considered in the commentary.
This data is from the second through the ninth rounds of the indicators.