The continent fell significantly short of realising its targets on ensuring that democratic values and practices are the norm, realising 27% of her 2019 target. The only significant progress that was recorded was on operationalising the African Charter on Democracy – with a score based on countries that have signed and ratified the Charter achieving 98% and 87% of the 2019 target respectively. However, progress on integrating the Charter into national planning and development instruments has been slow – exhibited by the weak performance of 22% against the 2019 target.

Similarly, the percentage of the African population who believe that elections are free, fair and transparent; and the proportion of the population on the continent that perceives that there is press freedom and associated freedom of speech – pitched at 26% and 13% respectively of the 2019 targets. This reflects a weak performance of the continent. Furthermore, the continent fell short by 86% of its 2019 target regarding the proportion of people who believe that there are effective mechanisms and oversight institutions to hold their leaders accountable.

The 2013 - 2019 reporting period highlighted discrete and collective efforts by Member States towards strengthening institutions and improving leadership with a view to ensuring that public services are more professional, efficient, responsive, accountable, impartial and corruption-free. The overall aggregate score, however, signals a very weak performance, achieving only 4% of the target value in 2019.

Measured by the proportion of persons who had at least one contact with a public official and paid a bribe to a public official or were asked for a bribe by those public officials during the previous twelve months, there was an upsurge registered in the proportions in a number of countries.