The Ibrahim Index of African Governance has just been announced for 2009. The index can be used in the same way as other indices such as the Freedom House and Polity, or the World Bank Governance Indicators. Like them, it provides an overall score for good governance that is an aggregation of individual scores in four general categories (Safety and Rule of Law; Participation and Human Rights; Sustainable Economic Opportunity; Human Development). Unlike Freedom House and Polity, it is not attempting to establish how democratic a country is, though there is a strong correlation between the various indices.

The index goes from 0-100, with 100 being the best score. In 2009, the highest score is Mauritius at 82.83 (85.1 last year where it was also first). The lowest is Somalia at 15.24 (18.9 last year where it was also last).

In terms of semi-presidential countries, Cape Verde is ranked second overall at 78.01 (74.7 last year). The lowest this year is Chad, which comes second-bottom below Zimbabwe!, at 29.86 (last year it was DRC). (There is a margin of error of +/-6 points.)

The website sets out the methodology of the Index very clearly. Obviously, this is a new resource. There is no historic data. The website makes it clear that data before 2006 is unreliable. So, the index is not useful for time-series comparisons, but it is very good for contemporary cross-sectional analysis.

Here is the list of the top 30 countries.

Source here.