AFRICAN

TRANSFORMATION

INDEX 2023

Tracking Africa’s economic
successes and setbacks

Additional downloads
Explore the ATI Scorecard

Explore the data behind the economic transformation progress of 30 African countries between 2000-2020.

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Growth with DEPTH

Explore the ATI in DEPTH and see how African countries performed on five dimensions between 2000-2020.

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Select a Country Profile

Explore the economic transformation case studies of 11 African countries.

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About the ATI

The African Transformation Index (ATI) is a tool to measure progress of African countries on economic transformation. It can assist policymakers, researchers, and development partners in uncovering economic vulnerabilities, reinforcing resilience to various crises, and keeping Africa’s transformation agenda on track.

The ATI tracks five dimensions of economic transformation:

  • Diversification: the capacity to produce and export a broad array of goods and services.
  • Export competitiveness: The ability to compete in the global market for non-extractive exports.
  • Productivity increases: labor productivity in the agriculture, manufacturing and construction, and services sectors, weighted by the relative size of each sector.
  • Technology upgrading: the share of medium- and high-technology content in production and exports.
  • Human well-being: incomes, income inequality, and total and female formal employment.
Coverage
The ATI measures economic transformation across 30 African countries using the five dimensions of DEPTH through 14 indicators. The 2023 index covers the years 2000-2020, with scores measured as a three-year moving average.
How to read the ATI scores

The overall ATI score is a composite of the five DEPTH dimension scores. All scores are on a scale of 0-100, where a score of 0 indicates no transformation, and a country with a score of 100 is considered highly transformed. The scores allow for the measurement of individual countries’ economic transformation progress over time and enable inter-country comparisons.

The ATI is based on a three-year moving average, where the score for the year 2000 is the average of the scores for 1999 and 2001. These averages smooth out outliers that result from the high volatility caused by the heavy dependence among many of the ATI economies on commodities, which have rapidly fluctuating prices.

Index updates
The first edition of the index was released in 2014. The 2023 edition has a wider scope and broader coverage, with more sophisticated indicators:
  • The range of countries has increased from 24 countries to 30 countries, comprising 86.5% of the total GDP of the continent.
  • The Human well-being dimension has been updated to include an indicator that tracks female labor participation and the Gini index of income inequality.
  • The Diversification and Productivity increases dimensions have been updated to capture performance in the services and construction sectors, which have gained prominence on the continent.
  • Labor productivity is now weighted by the relative size of each sector for a more accurate aggregate measurement under Productivity increases.
Index scope

The ATI maintains a disciplined focus on the five dimensions of the DEPTH framework by design. It does not measure numerous notable factors of long-term development success, such as peace and security, democracy and governance, environmental sustainability, or institutional development. Nor does the ATI take into account the impact of positive or negative externalities that may have transpired during the transformation process—environmental harm from industrialization, for example. While all critical to a country’s social and economic stability, such elements fall outside the scope of the index as a tool to measure progress toward economic transformation as defined by the DEPTH framework.

Explore the ATI Scorecard

The African Transformation Index (ATI) assesses the performance of 30 African countries on the five DEPTH dimensions of economic transformation and aggregates them in an overall index with a scale from 0 (least transformed) to 100 (most transformed). This scorecard shows how each country scored on the overall index and on each DEPTH dimension.

Growth with DEPTH

While economic growth is important, it is insufficient to drive Africa’s economic transformation. African economies must tackle the five dimensions of DEPTH: Diversification, Export competitiveness, Productivity increases, Technological upgrading, and Human well-being. Growth with DEPTH is an analytical framework that provides pathways for economic transformation in Africa. In the ATI, DEPTH scores are calculated using 14 indicators.

Explore the ATI Country Profiles

Explore 11 of the 30 African countries tracked by the ATI in greater detail:

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