Africa Region Working Paper Series No. 68

Bottom-Up Administrative Reform:
Designing Indicators for a Local Governance Scorecard in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper provides a historical overview of the role and framework of governance assessment in World Bank operations, as well as an informative, process oriented and technical description of the design of such a framework in the Nigerian public administration reform environment. The paper outlines the process and rationale behind the development, modification and refinement, by the World Bank and other international agencies, of governance performance indicator categories, from the broadly defined “first generation” indicators to the more precise, meaningful and effective “second generation” ones. Through the Nigerian case study, the paper also illustrates the integration of a governance assessment scorecard into a community driven development operation, and the analytical and participatory process through which the scorecard was developed. Emerging findings explicit in this paper suggest that governance indicators, both qualitative and quantitative, ought to be simple, measurable, directly related to specific areas of governance, based on accessible data, universal to and acceptable by most government authorities in the particular country in which the framework is applied.

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