Corruption remains one of Africa’s impediments to attaining inclusive growth and structural transformation. However, management inefficiencies in both public and private sectors can also be attributed to the low transformation of Africa’s economies. While the continent registered robust economic growth over the last ten years, it is still perceived as one of the most corrupt regions globally. This has raised genuine concerns regarding the credibility and reliability of current measurements of corruption. The ECA recognizes that there are indeed problems associated with measuring corruption, particularly in the African context, which need further probing.
The forthcoming special edition of the African Governance Report IV (AGR) titled “Measuring corruption in Africa: the international dimension matters” focuses on the importance of measuring corruption and understanding its international dimension. The Report underscores that current measurements of corruption, which are predominantly perception-based, have significant methodological inadequacies. Perception-based indices focus on country rankings which only serves to name and shame, and as such, do not provide a credible assessment of corruption in Africa. While the Report takes cognizance of the usefulness of these indices in informing the regional and global governance discourse, it also highlights their failure to provide useful insights and practical recommendations to adequately inform policy reforms in the region. Conversely, alternative non-perception-based or the objective methods of assessing corruption also remain inadequately developed. Even more concerning, these indices completely ignore the international dimension of corruption which is very key to understanding this phenomenon in Africa. The external and transnational dimension of corruption in Africa, perpetrated through activities of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) has not been investigated.
The AGR IV calls on African countries and partners to move away from pure perception measures of corruption and focus on approaches to measuring corruption that are fact-based with more objective quantitative criteria. In the interim, perception-based methods anchored on more transparent and representative surveys should be used with caution and complimented, where possible, with quantitative country/case-specific indicators to produce more sophisticated and useful measures of corruption. This approach will go a long way in providing concrete recommendations for policy reforms aimed at building robust governance institutions for structural transformation.
In preparing the AGR IV, the ECA immensely benefited from contributions and input at an Ad- hoc Experts’ Group Meeting held on 10th December 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, following an ECA-wide internal review. The Report will be launched at the 9th Joint AUC-ECA Annual Meeting of the AU Conference of Ministers of the Economy and Finance and ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, taking place on 31 March to 5 April 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.