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African countries record 20% improvement in quality performance

By BusinessNews Staff on July 3, 2014

The overall quality of government policies and institutions that broadly support growth and reduce poverty in African countries remained steady in 2013, whereas progress was made in a number of former conflict affected countries, according to a new World Bank review.

Countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Congo Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Rwanda, saw an improvement in debt policy and management.

The latest Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) Africa report, described the progress made in low-income African countries to strengthen their policies and institutions helped to spur better development outcomes.

This year’s report included two new countries from the Middle East and North Africa region: Djibouti and Yemen.

The CPIA scores countries on a scale of one to six (with 6 as the highest and 1 as the lowest) using 16 indicators in four areas to determine a country’s final score.

These areas included economic management, structural policies, policies for social inclusion and equity, and public sector management and institutions.

The scores are primarily used to determine the allocation of zero-interest financing scores for the countries eligible for support from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank Group’s concessional fund for the world’s poorest countries.

The results showed the overall score for Africa was steady at 3.2
“Although there are a number of highly performing countries, African IDA-eligible countries on average continue to lag behind those in other regions in their policy and institutional ratings,” the Chief Economist for the World Bank Africa Region, Francisco Ferreira said.

“There is still a lot of work to be done in Africa to meet the region’s needs for effective public services, transparent and efficient government operations. This is so that the CPIA can be a valuable resource for governments, the private sector, civil society, researchers and the media to monitor a country’s progress and benchmark it against progress in other countries,” he added.

It showed that eight countries in subsaharan Africa had a rise in overall CPIA scores. More policy reforms lifted Rwanda’s CPIA score to 3.9, putting it at the top of the CPIA list alongside Cabo Verde and Kenya. Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Tanzania followed close behind, each with a score of 3.8. The Democratic Republic of Congo achieved the largest gain, boosting its score from 2.7 to 2.9.

The picture was also bright for countries transitioning out of years of conflict. Policy reforms in these and other fragile countries accounted for over half of the improvement in overall CPIA scores in this year’s report.

[This Day]

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