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Africans demand more from govts - Afro Barometer Report reveals

 

Majority of Africans are demanding more and better basic household services from their governments because they are not satisfied with the performance of the governments in respect of providing those services.

About 56 per cent of Africans say their governments have done fairly or badly in providing clean water and sanitation services, with 55 per cent expressing dissatisfaction with the delivery of reliable power supply.

These are highlights of findings in the latest Afro Barometer Report titled, ‘What People Want from Government: Service Performance Ratings in 34 countries’, which was released in Accra yesterday.

The report did not cite Ghana as a best or worst country in respect of the provision of such basic household and social services, meaning the country performed averagely.

What is Afro Barometer?

The Afro Barometer is a survey conducted by the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) that tracks public perception of various governance issues.

Initiated in 1999, the survey seeks to draw the attention of African governments to public approval ratings of their stewardship, with the view to influencing change in policy and better performance in respect of service delivery.

This year, the survey focused on the delivery of basic household and social services and the management of natural resources and collated the views of people in 32 African countries.

Other key findings

On education and basic health service delivery, majority of Africans gave their governments high approval ratings, with 59 per cent lauding efforts at addressing educational needs and 57 per cent satisfied with efforts at improving basic health services.

Majority of them, however, identified long wait times (77 per cent) and lack of medicines or supply (69 per cent) in public health facilities, as well as overcrowded classrooms (61 per cent) and lack of textbooks and supplies (57 per cent) in schools, as critical challenges that needed to be addressed.

On the management of natural resources, the 2013 Afro Barometer Report indicated that majority of people (60 per cent) in 22 natural resource-endowed African countries said “it is fairly difficult or very difficult to know how the government uses revenues from taxes and fees”.

Majority of the people (54 per cent) were also concerned about the fact that corrupt officials in the extractive industry often or always went unpunished.

Majority of people in the 22 natural resource-endowed countries rated their presidents high as being law-abiding.

Make use of findings

The Executive Director of CDD-Ghana, Professor Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, expressed the hope that African governments would make good use of the Afro Barometer findings.

The Africa Regional Co-ordinator of the Revenue Watch Institute, Mr Emmanuel Kuyole, said there was the need to move beyond demanding access to information and transparency to ensuring enforceability of laws by governments.

A Deputy Director at the UNDP, Mr Jeremias Blaser, said the findings clearly showed that now it was no longer enough to practise democracy but that democracy needed to deliver dividends to the people.

“Democracy is about quality, so building schools without teachers or hospitals without doctors will not fool the citizens about democracy,” he remarked.

Writer’s Email: [email protected]

 

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