Yaounde — The Sub-Regional Office for Central Africa of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) will present the fourth edition of the African Governance Report (AGR IV) to members of Government, parliamentarians, senior civil servants, academics, diplomats, representatives from development bodies and journalists based in Cameroon on Friday the 25th of November 2016 on the campus of the International Relations Institute of Cameroon (IRIC) Yaounde.
The Africa Governance Report IV titled "Measuring corruption in Africa: the international dimension matters" raises the problem of credibility and reliability with current predominantly perception-based measures of corruption of African countries and highlights their shortcomings. The report says current perception-based indices misrepresent the contextual realities of African countries and completely ignore the escalating international dimension of corruption.
It therefore suggests that perception-based methods anchored on more transparent and representative surveys should be used with caution and complemented, where possible, with quantitative country or case-specific indicators to produce more sophisticated and useful measures of corruption. The study also urges Governments and their partners to focus on approaches to measuring corruption that are fact-based and built on more objective quantitative criteria.
As far as stemming corruption is concerned, AGR IV proposes four main pillars to be considered by African countries: enhancing ownership and participation in development planning; improving transparency and accountability; building credible governance institutions; and improving the regional and global governance architecture.
Guests at the presentation event are expected to engage in discussions that will domesticate the relevance of the report and its thematic concerns to the Central African sub-regional context in general and the Cameroonian context in particular. The report can be downloaded at:
http://www.uneca.org/publications/african-governance-report-iv
