“Improving the Scoring with one point in Transparency International’s global index is a huge achievement. Rwanda’s improved score was on many new initiatives namely free movement of people, ease of online application and of doing business,” said Immacule Ingabire, the Chairperson of Transparency International Rwanda at the launch of the corruption perception Index (CPI)2018 when reacting at Rwanda improvement by one point to score 56 out of 100, making it one of the five least corrupt countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and 48th worldwide out of 180 countries surveyed.
CPI has been released by Transparency International Secretariat since 1995 and for the last 7 years, Rwanda has been ranked among the least corrupt globally and among the top least corrupted in sub-Saharan region. The average score at global level is 43/100 and more than 2/3 of ranked countries score below 50/100. But since 2012, the least score Rwanda got was 49 in 2014 whereas in 2012 and 2013, they got the same score 53, 54 for 2015 and 2016 and for 2017, Rwanda got 55. Being located from the least scoring region Sub-Saharan Africa with the regional average 32%, Rwanda is among the top 5 scoring in the region along with Seychelles, Botswana, Cape Verde and Namibia.
During the launch of CPI 2018 in Rwanda, Transparency International Rwanda (TI-Rw) has compared the survey with Rwanda Bribery Index (RBI) 2018, the 9th edition published, the annual publication conducted by TI-RW which aim at establishing experiences and perceptions of this specific form of corruption in Rwanda. The comparison showed that there are a lot of similarities, for example the 2018 CPI showed an improvement in scoring, the same it was for was RBI 2018.
Though Rwanda is performing well, there is still a long way to go, as explained by Transparency International Rwanda. There is a need among others, to empower citizens to hold governments accountable, close the implementation gap between anti-corruption legislations, practice and enforcement and ensure media development and also protect press freedom.
As far data are concerned, among 13 data sources used to construct the CPI 2018, six were used for the Rwandan CPI, those are African Development Bank Governance Ratings, Bertelsmann Foundation Sustainable Governance Indicators, Global Insight Country Risk Ratings, World Bank - Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey (EOS) and Varieties of Democracy (VDEM) Project. The selection of sources were based on specific criteria : reliable data from credible institution, data addresses corruption in public sector, at least four pint scale, cross country comparability and multiyear data set.
2018 year’s theme was : Corruption and the crisis of democracy. The theme was selected in consultation with TI movement and was the topic that most resonated with chapters according to the CPI survey. As far as methodology is concerned, selection of sources are based on reliable data from credible institutions and data from different sources is standardized around the mean and rescaled to a scale from 0 (highest level of perceived corruption) to 100 (lowest level). CPI is also calculated as simple (non-weighted) average of all available rescaled source scores per country where minimum of 3 data sources per country are used.