Introduction

A service-oriented government has a social contract to deliver services to its population, thereby winning trust and legitimacy (Besley and Ghatak, 2007). Since the early 1980s, African countries have embarked on various forms of ‘modern’ public sector reforms, with mixed results, and various reasons have been given for these. One of the criticisms is that reforms were undertaken without sufficient data or understanding of the realities on the ground, and thus resultant economic growth is questionable (Jerven, 2011). By the 1990s, the debate had moved to whether or not the African civil service was too big (‘bloated’), cost too much and needed to be reduced (see, for example, Kiggundu, 1992; see also World Bank, 1993, 1997, 2000). Indeed, the ‘development’ community often argues that what African countries need is not so much building new capacities as discovering and implementing more strategic and effective utilisation of existing indigenous ones (The World Bank, 2005).

In order to utilise capacity better and accelerate progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), African governments, donors and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have committed to increase resources to improve service delivery. Unfortunately, budget allocations alone do not determine outcomes (Besley and Ghatak, 2007), and are poor indicators of the true quality of services in countries with weak institutions (Svensson, 2012). Moreover, when service delivery failures are systematic, relying exclusively on the public sector to address them may not be realistic (UNECA, 1991), requiring an approach that may incorporate the private and voluntary sectors (Besley and Ghatak, 2007; Makoba, 2011). It is necessary to empower citizens and civil society actors to put pressure on governments to improve performance (Besley et al, 2005). For this to be realised, citizens must have access to information on service delivery performance as well as quality.

Until recently, there has been no robust, standardised set of indicators to measure the quality of services as experienced by citizens in Africa. Existing indicators tended to be fragmented, focusing either on final outcomes or inputs, rather than on the underlying systems (ACBF, 2011; The World Bank, 2012). Efforts such as the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) did not make much headway because of its voluntary nature, and the tendency of governments to restrict the cohort studied as well as being inadequately self-critical (Jordaan, 2006; Boyle, 2008).