Report: Why Nigeria’s Civil Service Not on Global Ranking

A report by Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University has advanced the reasons why Nigeria was not included among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, which civil service were ranked on the International Civil Service Effectiveness (InCiSE).

Nigeria and Brazil were excluded from the ranking.

The technical report titled: Assessment of the Applicability of the InCiSE Methodology to Nigeria,” was prepared in 2019 by Zenobia Ismail and supported by the UK Civil Service and funded by the Open Society Foundation.

The report determined it was not possible to include Nigeria’s civil service because of insufficient data sources available matching the fine-grained data on civil service effectiveness available for OECD countries.

This persistent lack of reliable data was also alluded to by the Acting Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HoS), Dr. Folasade Yemi-Esan, at a workshop evaluating the technical paper on the applicability of InCiSE methodology to Nigeria.

“Nigeria and some developing countries are yet to be included in the index due to inadequacy of relevant data needed for the assessment. This informed the development of a technical paper in 2019 which examined the viability of including the Nigerian federal civil service in the InCiSE Index using the same or similar indicators, themes, and data sources as those used in compiling the 2017 Index,” Yemi-Esan admitted.

The report, however, claimed that data was only available for 26 of the 60 themes representing 43 per cent in the index.