Launching the Fourth Edition of the African Governance Report (AGR IV)

Abstract

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. 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.