Good governance has been a concern in the transport sector for decades. The sector has a major contribution to make to both poverty reduction and economic growth and billions of dollars have been spent on improving and rehabilitating transport infrastructure.
Performance continues to lag behind expectations, with ‘poor governance’ often being cited as an underlying cause. In the past, it has proved difficult to reach consensus on what is meant by good governance – and even less so, how best to measure it.
The partnership
The Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy program (SSATP) is a partnership of 36 African countries, eight regional economic communities, three African institutions, national and regional organisations, and international development partners, which are all dedicated to the goal of ensuring that transport plays its full part in achieving the developmental objectives of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Under SSATP, we worked with WSP to review and develop a series of transport sector indicators that could be used to highlight performance and in doing so, advocate for change in the transport sector. While indicators are often viewed as being merely technical, the aim was to produce a series of ‘advocacy indicators’ to focus attention on critical factors and expose the quality of governance in a sector. The study drew on visits to Mali, Tanzania and Zambia and made recommendations about how monitoring data could be collected and disseminated.
Contact Chris Barnett (chris.barnett@itad.com) if you would like to discuss this project.
Image © Tanzania. Photo Credit: Emmeline Willcocks