Corruption doesn’t only happen in Africa

Back in December, I wrote a piece on the new data quality index developed by London based research firm World Economics. Looking at the ranking, I suggested two key takeaways for African countries.

1) Data quality is an issue in most countries in the world since no one was able to get 100 out 100. African countries can provide solutions to the data quality challenges especially with respect to informal economies.

2) The best performing countries in Africa are the ones which seem to value data / statistics and put resource into their statistical offices.

Transparency International came out recently with its 2015 corruption index and looking at the results, here are couple of takeaways regarding African countries performance overall.

1) Corruption is affecting all countries to some degree since no one was able to get 100 out 100. Denmark, the least corrupted country comes with a score of 91. Again the world is looking for ways to reduce the corruption and Africa can provide solutions.

2) The best performing country in Africa is Botswana with an index of 63, coming 28th overall ahead of Portugal, Israel or even Spain. Rather than talking about Africa as a whole, its worth looking at specific country performance.

3) Four African countries are amongst the top 50: Botswana (28th), Rwanda (44th), Mauritius (45th) and Namibia (45th). For Rwanda (+5) and Namibia (+4), it’s an improvement year over year while for Mauritius and Botswana scores were unchanged from 2014.

When you combine the data quality, corruption score and the GDP growth, Rwanda comes first. See graphs below. It is another confirmation that the country has a small economy, which is well managed, that values data and measurement with a strong and competent leadership can be an example to follow.

African countries don’t have to be oil/resources-rich countries to perform well. Rwanda may not have the population size of Nigeria or Ethiopia but may actually put itself in a position to sell or provide products and services to these countries. In the process, it will create more wealth / per capita than these “bigger” countries. Is Rwanda on its way to become the Switzerland of Africa?

Yannick Lefang, Founder at SOKO Insight Inc.

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