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Mo Ibrahim one of Africa’s premier business people particularly in the mobile telephony
industry, aims to encourage good governance and leadership in Africa through various
initiatives.
Two key initiatives carried out by the foundation are a $5 million prize awarded annually to
an exceptional African leader and the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG). The IIAG
gathers data on a variety of indicators and ranks African states according to how well they
are governed. The ranking scores nations on the broad issues of Safety and Rule of Law,
Participation and Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human
Development in an attempt to statistically measure the state of governance in African
states. According to the index, overall continental governance has improved from 2000 to
present despite there being countries and regions that have shown mixed signs over the
period – in fact this year, no African leader was able to win the Ibrahim Prize!
Back in 2009 Mo Ibrahim published an article in the ‘Innovations’ journal titled “Prerequisite
to Prosperity: Why Africa’s Future Depends on Better Governance” in which he argues that
good governance is imperative for Africa’s growth. To quote the article:
“Africa and its citizens will never take advantage of the opportunities presented by its
own boundless potential without good governance. The most pressing issues hinge
on proper rule: without the proper administration of a state’s resources, there can be
no environmental sustainability; without rule of law, no human rights… Nothing will
happen without good governance”.
But the question is – how is technology affecting the state of governance in Africa?
Power to the people
What happens when ordinary citizens are exposed to a wide array of information and ideas
from all sorts of places?
There is a saying that ‘knowledge is power’ if there’s one thing that today’s information
technologies (led by the Internet) have done is to empower people. We live in a world
where we are overwhelmed by information, in fact access to information has become as
cheap as typing a search query into Google or whatever other search engine and you