See also the ALPN Brief: The Mo Ibrahim African Governance Index and Leadership Prize Revisited: How Dr. Ibrahim and Other Well-Off Africans Can Best Foster Good Governance in African Countries (By Jump-Starting Resource-Pooling Efforts to Build High-Impact Independent Information-based Institutions and Infrastructures that Will Foster Accountability and the Emergence of Visionary and Transformational Leaders)

Governance for Development in Africa Initiative	GDAI - PhD scholarships	GDAI - Visiting Fellowships 

	SOAS commemorates generous gift from Mo Ibrahim Foundation. 27 March 2008

Trophy leaders are not enough. Calestous Juma. The Guardian (UK). "...The $5m prize intended to help improve Africa's leadership risks diverting attention from more critical institutional issues. ...Much of Africa currently holds multi-party elections. But parliaments are poorly supported. Elected leaders can hardly be effective representatives of their people. For example, many parliaments debate national budgets but they cannot influence their contents. They merely rubber-stamp proposals for the executive branch, many of which are discussed in advance with development partners. Similarly, judicial offices remain under-funded and lack the administrative infrastructure to render justice in a fair and efficient way. They need to digitise their records but can hardly get the support to do so. The lack of administrative infrastructure reduces transparency, breeding corruption and other malpractices. All of this will reflect badly on leaders in power. The prize serves a useful purpose in focusing attention on the need to improve governance in general and leadership in particular, but more needs to be done to help Africa build the institutional infrastructure needed to deepen democracy."

If political culture is unsound, no prize will improve governance. Xolela Mangcu. BusinessDay (South Africa). "...It is in civil society that the deliberation about good governance and good leadership must be located. Ultimately, the defining legacy of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation initiative will be the extent to which instruments such as prizes and indexes are leveraged to liberate the political cultures of our societies...."

How to Rank Good Governance: The Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. Brookings Institution Panel Discussion. October 25, 2007. Brookings hosted Professor Rotberg who discussed the creation of the new index and the implications of the African Leadership Prize for the improvement of governance in Africa. He was joined by Chris Fomuyoh, director for Central and West Africa at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Aart Kraay, lead economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank.  Transcript of Panel Discussion

Lawrence Haddad on the Mo Ibrahim Prize. Lawrence Haddad, Institute of Development Studies, UK 

African leaders: index the streets!. G. Pascal Zachary. Africa Works

....Unwilling to criticize actual African leaders, these global actors promote safe, sanitary “benchmarks” for leadership. These benchmarks, always debateable and grounded in mushy statistics, are psuedo-scientific, misleading and ultimately corrosive. Defenders say these indices are better than nothing. Yet metrics for leadership can only grow out of the societies in which leaders themselves grow....The trouble with leadership in Africa is not a lack of great leaders or an ignorance about what constitutes great leadership. I meet great leaders all the time in Africa. They lack power, not a moral compass. Their honesty and integrity are a handicap. They are smothered, pressured, and sometimes even extinguished by rivalrous bad leaders who in an endless display of Gresham’s Law prove time again that “bad (leaders) drive out good.” The academic indices for African leadership don’t calculate the one ultimate source of leadership: people power...

Ordinary – The New Extraordinary. Hennie van Vuuren. Institute for Security Studies, South Africa

The extent to which the positive values of African leadership have been debased found expression in the inaugural Mo-Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. ...Africa, therefore, seemingly demands a different set of governance standards. Could it be that there are two objective measures of governance – that which is ‘African’ and that which is ‘good’ (the rest of the world)? What follows is an implicit assumption that African leaders are so corrupt and money hungry that the only way to ensure that they do the right thing is to dangle the lure of more money...A real concern is that this reinforces a colonial stereotype of the African ethical compass, one guided only by a shiny silver dollar. If anything leaders like Chissano and his peers should vocally reject initiatives such as this which serve only to patronise. The tacit acceptance of such awards send a subtle message to aspirant African politicians, businessmen and the millions of bureaucrats across the continent: ‘doing the right thing’ – doing what one is elected and/or paid to do - is not part of the African ‘condition’ but is instead something special’. We therefore run the risk of elevating what should be ordinary behaviour to the level of the extraordinary...