Rating Africa

Strengthening African governance requires a new method of comparing those nations who deliver essential public goods to their citizens against those failing to perform well or at all. Africa declared in July that it would monitor and improve its national forms of governance. Now it says that it will not.

Africa, led by Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, has decided not to use a promised peer review mechanism, or anything else, to classify states like Liberia, the Sudan, or Zimbabwe (among many others) as nonperforming. Peer review, as a way of encouraging the worse governed African states to do better, was developed in exchange for higher levels of donor assistance to Africa from the developed world. But criticizing each other's deficiencies clearly had its perils, even for the new Africa that Mbeki and Obasanjo are attempting to create.

Economic empowerment and improved living standards depend in large measure on good governance, the rule of law, political freedoms, stability, low levels of corruption, and a strong infrastructure. Foreign investment and donor assistance flow to the better-governed countries. The fast-growing countries of the developing world all deliver high-quality public goods, the building blocks of successful governance. Those places with severely reduced living standards, massive health and educational crises, collapsing roads, and gruesome civil wars are governed shamefully.

The best-governed (Botswana, Mauritius, Senegal) and the worst-governed states of Africa stand out. But how do the others rank? How do they compare to Southeast Asian or Latin American nations? Any attempts to help Africans uplift the poorly governed regions depend in large part on a valid method of designating the positive achievers and encouraging and helping others.

Already, by assiduously rating the countries of the world on the degrees to which each is corrupt, Transparency International has effectively forced the existence of corruption out of the closet, stigmatized those ranked most corrupt, stimulated national miscreants to combat the scourge of corruption, and held all nations to a single, measurable standard.

Governance requires a similar, parallel method of designating those nations and leaders who are governing well and those who are not. In-country experts could offer their opinions, a subjective method similar to Transparency's. But a more objective approach would be less liable to criticism, especially given the natural sensitivity of governments to any index of comparative successes and failures.

During the past four years Kennedy School graduate students and I have been attempting to create a quantitative ranking system for African and other developing world countries. We use an array of measurable proxy output indicators, and continually refine their variety and calibrate their precision.

Using such a method, good governance can be measured by the extent to which a country provides national and human security, a strong legal framework (including independent judges), permits political participation, enables economic growth, and fosters an entrepreneurial climate, offers macroeconomic and fiscal stability, limits corruption, maintains a solid infrastructure, educates effectively, ministers to health needs, and protects the environment. Each of those criteria demands several kinds of quantifiable calculations. But they can be made, and the appropriate kinds of statistical tests applied.

The results, especially after several years of ratings, could provide data for donors and investors. Flows of outside funds could thus be directed to those countries that are making tough choices and performing more effectively for their citizens. Equally important, if a ranking system is seen as fair and objective, it can spur the nations and their ruling elites to improve their adherence to the rule of law, grant more political participation, and pay better attention to different methods of empowering their citizens. A rating method would demonstrate how severely countries such as Liberia and Zimbabwe, and even some of the presumably middle-performing states, including Cameroon or Chad, are cheating their citizens of their inalienable rights and depriving them of opportunities.

If the people of Botswana can enjoy the benefits of esteemed methods of governance, why not others? An objective ranking system should at the least validate and support the efforts of those leaders who are trying to make Africa do more for all of its peoples.