Mo will be joined by a panel of African experts representing the continent’s growing next generation voices, Yvonne Apea Mensah from Ghana and Nasi Rwigema from South Africa, who will provide their own opinions of this year’s Index findings. The panel will also respond to questions in real time from online users.

Following the launch, MIF, in partnership with the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), will host a high-level discussion on the findings on Friday, 2 November in Pretoria, South Africa. A separate media advisory will follow with the details of this event.

The IIAG is an unmatched resource providing the world’s most extensive analysis of the quality of governance in African countries.

With the Index, MIF seeks to enable governments, citizens, business, academia, policy makers and analysts to use its findings as a tool to assess accurately the delivery of public goods and services and drive conversations about governance in Africa. As such, the data are made freely available each year via the IIAG Data Portal (iiag.online).

·                     The 2018 IIAG launch will take place online during a 30-minute Facebook Live event with Mo and two African next generation voices, taking the discussion directly to the public to encourage dialogue across social media using the hashtags #IIAG and #AskMIF.

·                     With ten years of data to draw from, the 2018 IIAG is uniquely positioned to measure trends in governance, providing in-depth analysis on how the quality of governance has changed over the past five years (2013-2017) within the context of the last decade (2008-2017), and what has or could be key to Africa’s transformation.

·                     In every iteration, MIF – assisted by the IIAG’s Advisory Council– looks at improving the structure, components and methodology of the IIAG. Due to this annual revision, every year MIF recalculates all scores in the Index.

·                     Previous iterations of the IIAG covered data from 2000 onwards. The 2018 IIAG is for the first time providing comparable governance data for the last decade only, to strengthen the robustness of the findings.

·                     For the first time, an assessment of youth inclusion is part of the IIAG. Through the indicator Promotion of Socio-economic Integration of Youth (provided by Global Integrity), the Index assesses whether there is a government policy/strategy to increase the socio-economic integration of youth.

·                     This year’s IIAG will have the added focus of analyzing the data through thematic frameworks and broader themes including: economic opportunity for Africa’s citizens, the demographic dividend, transparency and accountability.

·                     The ten-year time series includes the most recent governance performances, raising the bar in areas such as Health, where countries should benchmark themselves to more current standards.

·                     The IIAG contains analysis across 102 indicators from 35 independent African and global data institutions to cover all 54 African countries in the areas of Safety & Rule of Law, Participation & Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human Development.

·                     The Data Portal is a user-friendly interface that offers a bespoke analysis of governance ranks, scores and trends for each country. Users can create printable charts and graphics from the data.