Country snapshots: methodology and data
Country TPA snapshots have been adapted from an unpublished report, written as part of a scan of the TPA landscape undertaken by OTT Consulting to inform the Hewlett Foundation’s new grantmaking strategy. The report focused on trends that have implications for TPA in a selected number of countries where the Hewlett Foundation is active: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and Tanzania.
Authors: Ajoy Datta and Fletcher Tembo, with research support from Linnea Mills and Victoria Silva Sanchez. Editor: Hannah Caddick. Reviewers: Hewlett Foundation TPA team.
Questions
This rapid evidence assessment of country trends intended to address two questions from the Hewlett Foundation:
- What are the factors shaping governance outcomes in the focus countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and Tanzania) including principle causes for poor governance and accountability gaps, as well as factors contributing to good governance?
- What major challenges have emerged or worsened? Particularly, how prevalent an issue is the closing of civic space in the focus countries?
To answer these questions, where possible and appropriate we collected information in two broad areas: (1) Trends in income growth, poverty, inequality, human development, service delivery performance and governance (in areas such as government openness, political accountability, and state effectiveness). (2) Trends in factors that shape the governance and service delivery context. These include:
- Context: this might feature a country’s geography, demographic profile, mass attitudes and behaviour and technological changes
- The interests and agendas of competing domestic, regional and international actors, the relationships of power between them and the way they have shifted over time/history
- Institutions — the rules, norms, practices and relationships that influence individual and collective behaviour in the field of governance and service delivery. These can be formal and widely understood in the form of laws and regulation or informal and only understood by certain groups of people.
- Policy networks — the relationships between actors responsible for policy decisions and those such as interest groups or levels of government with which they consult and negotiate.
- Ideas about governance and service delivery and how they are shared within key stakeholder groups.
- Events (or critical junctures), which may be routine and anticipated, such as elections, or unanticipated incidents such as social or natural crises.
Methods and data sources
We reviewed documentation and interviewed a governance expert for each of the five countries. Documentation included:
- Country- and sector-level political economy analyses.
- Country level reports from Bertelsmann Stiftung, the US State Department, Freedom House, Civicus and Afrobarometer.
Limitations
We had hoped to say more about the impact of Covid-19. However, most of our data is from written sources published before the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, resulting in a lack of data about this.
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