We had just finished a meeting of the President, Tony

Blair and the Minister of Agriculture. Bumbuna is the

hydroelectric dam the Government had completed the

year before, bringing power to the capital for the first

time, the landmark achievement of the President’s first

term, and he had been discussing the lessons he took

from that experience that he now wanted to apply to

agriculture: ruthless focus on the priority programme,

clear goals and milestones, consistent application of his

authority, and a process to co-ordinate different parts of

government.

Two years earlier my personal journey with AGI began in

the same office. I joined the organisation three months

after its launch to lead the new project in Sierra Leone,

working alongside President Koroma’s team at State

House in Freetown. Two years later, in autumn 2012,

we completed our work in the Ministry of Agriculture

as Sierra Leone prepared for its third free and peace-

ful Presidential elections since the devastating civil war.

I tell this story because it represents to me what AGI is

about.

2 0 1 2 A N N U A L R E P O R T : C E O ’ S L E T T E R

O U R M I S S I O NWe began back in 2008 as an organisation built on

three simple but deeply held beliefs:

• That effective governance matters – the hard-

est part of government, wherever you are in the

world, isn’t coming up with a great policy idea but

seeing it implemented to deliver results;

• That political authority matters – the centre of

government, the heart of political power and au-

thority, is a critical part of the system capable of

delivering change over a broad landscape but too

often overlooked;

• And that change is possible – above all we main-

tain the optimistic view that Africa’s time for

change is now, as a new generation of African

leaders, like President Koroma, look to take their

countries beyond their troubled pasts and to re-

alise the potential of their people.

The theory of change which that leads to goes like

this:

We start with a Government’s own policy priorities,

because genuine government ownership is vital for

reform to stick – that’s why the President saying “this

is my Bumbuna for agriculture” was so important. We

place advisors inside partner governments, working

alongside local public servants to build trusted rela-

tionships at the very heart of government, in parallel

to an on-going relationship between our Patron, Tony

Blair, and the President. This in turns means that we

can work with them to build the systems and the skills

they need to drive the three critical functions of ef-

fective governance: prioritisation, planning and perfor-

mance management.

“ E V E R Y C O U N T R Y

M U S T S U M M O N T H E

P A R T I C U L A R W I L L

A N D D I S C I P L I N E T O

I N V E S T I N I T S O W N

P E O P L E , O W N I T S O W N

C H A L L E N G E S , A N D

B E N E F I T F R O M I T S O W N

S U C C E S S . ”

H O W A R D G . B U F F E T T

In the case of the Smallholder Commercialisation Pro-

gramme, we saw that growing effectiveness translated

into change at both the macro- and the micro-level.

By the time of the election, in a country where 70%

of the population rely on subsistence farming and

nearly 80% of the rural population live below the pov-

erty line, and 30-40% of harvested produce had been

going to waste each year because of the poor state

of rural roads, the Programme had already seen over

900km of rural feeder roads rehabilitated and more

than 200 ‘Agricultural Business Centres’ constructed

in villages across the country, combining to enable

smallholders to make the transition from subsistence

to income-generating production. One big factor be-

hind this was a system of Presidential stocktakes that

AGI helped to establish. These regular meetings al-

lowed the President, when the implementation of the

Programme met with bottlenecks like the challenge of

setting up a “Roads Maintenance Fund”, to apply his

political authority to overcoming barriers to progress.

It is a demonstration of how process improvements

at the centre of power can have a leverage effect on

the system as a whole. At the micro-level, it is about

the many individuals like Sam Sesay, the Minister of

Agriculture and his team, and Professor Strasser-King

and colleagues in the President’s Strategy and Policy

Unit, whose commitment not just to delivering for their

people but to reforming the culture of government as

they do so is never short of inspiring.

“ [ A G I ] A R E A T T A C H E D

W I T H U S . W E S H A R E

A L O T O F T H I N G S

T O G E T H E R … W E A L W A Y S

S H A R E W H A T E V E R T H E Y

C O M E W I T H , A N D T H E Y

A C C E P T V E R Y R E A D I L Y

W H A T W E T H I N K . W E

W O R K T O G E T H E R O N A N

E Q U A L B A S I S . T H I S I S

T H E D I F F E R E N C E I S E E . ”

G O V E R N M E N T O F F I C I A L ,

O F F I C E O F T H E

P R E S I D E N T , S O U T H

S U D A N

So 2012, the basis for this, our fourth Annual Report,

was an important year for us here in AGI as it was for

President Koroma and the people of Sierra Leone.

Our own year was summed up by three themes:

A Y E A R O F

G R O W T H

2012 was the year in which we put our ideas into prac-

tice in a greater number and broader range of coun-

tries than ever before. Adding to the work we already

had in Rwanda, Liberia and of course Sierra Leone,

we embedded our new work in Guinea with a small

team supporting President Condé; we provided sup-

port to the Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in Nigeria; we started work in

the Office of the President in South Sudan; and we

moved quickly to support President Joyce Banda in

Malawi soon after she took office. Working in one of

Africa’s biggest countries alongside its newest, not to

mention our first in La Francophonie, all brought many

challenges and rich experiences; and in every case

I’m proud that we were invited in by the leader of the

country.

The aim of growth was to test our ideas in more and

different places and to have impact on a bigger scale.

In AGI we work in service to our partner governments,

but the people who matter most, the beneficiaries of

our work ultimately, are the people they themselves

serve: in 2011 the governments we supported rep-

resented 20 million people, by the end of 2012 that

number was 200 million. To give you a flavour of our

different work over the year in the Report we highlight

three case studies:

• the Strategic Capacity Building Initiative in Rwan-

da, where we play an integral role in delivering the

Government’s ambitious programme to deliver

improvements in energy, agriculture, mining and

investment;

• the “first 150 days” of President Johnson Sirleaf’s

second term in Liberia, where political momentum

and the power of accountability led to 200km of

roads being built, 3000 vocational training places cre-

ated and major progress in the critical power sector;

• and our newest work in Malawi, where we had

the absolute privilege of working with President

Banda and her team just weeks after she came

to power.

A Y E A R O F

L E A R N I N G

2012 was also the year in which we invested further in

our learning, as we strove to “lift the lid” on our work

and bring our findings to a wider audience. We con-

tinued to work with the innovative firm Agulhas Ap-

plied Knowledge to ensure rigorous and independent

evaluation of our work. And we stepped up the public

content of our work, for example through the AGI in

Action videos you’ll see on our website.

Working in new countries also gave us a richer un-

derstanding of the importance of local context when

designing systems reform and change programmes.

We had always understood that “all reform is politi-

cal”, and working in the complex environment of the

centre of government an ability to read and adapt to

political context is part of the skill of our people. But

as we worked in more places and learned from our

mistakes we came to a closer understanding of what

David Booth from the Overseas Development Insti-

tute has called “best fit, not best practice approach”.

Similarly, Matt Andrews’ work at Harvard on learning

and adaptive approaches to solving policy problems

– “problem driven iterative adaptation” – is one that

speaks to much of our experience. These two leading

thinkers are part of an emerging consensus in the de-

velopment community on approaches to governance

and reform. As we grow I want us to stay at the cutting

edge of this thinking, practitioners on a journey with

much still to do and to learn. But as we continue to

experiment, to innovate, to fail and to succeed I hope

that it is a debate we can increasingly contribute to as

well as learn from.

“ T H E R I G H T A P P R O A C H

T O G O V E R N A N C E F O R

D E V E L O P M E N T I S

‘ B E S T F I T ’ N O T ‘ B E S T

P R A C T I C E ’ . ”

D A V I D B O O T H , O V E R S E A S

D E V E L O P M E N T I N S T I T U T E

( O D I )

A Y E A R O F

C H A N G E

Finally, then, 2012 was a year of change for us: a year

when we grew, and also grew up. The year when we

stopped seeing ourselves as a start-up and began

to think of ourselves as the established independent

charity we have become. This shift is symbolised by

our move into our own “home”, of which we are very

proud! And we see it also in the strengthening of our

foundations: people and funding. We raised nearly

£3.5m in 2012 from a range of philanthropic and in-

stitutional sources to support our charitable activi-

ties and future growth; and we diversified our funding

base to promote our stability and independence. We

recruited over 20 people from the best of the interna-

tional public, private and third sectors, cementing our

reputation for having highly talented staff from diverse

backgrounds. And we invested further in development

and progression: more staff than ever moving between

programmes, and in our annual staff survey 70% say-

ing they wanted to spend 2-4 years of their careers

with us.

It was also a year of great personal change. As many

of you will know, in autumn 2012 our first CEO, Kate

Gross, was diagnosed with cancer. We are a small

and close organisation, and Kate’s sudden departure

as she stepped down to concentrate on her health

brought much sadness. But it is how we respond to

adversity that defines us, and I have never been more

proud than of the way in which the AGI family respond-

ed. Having worked alongside Kate since the beginning

it was a great challenge and a great privilege to be

asked by the Board to step into her shoes. As a friend,

it is an even greater pleasure to know that as I write

this she is completing her treatment and preparing to

come back and join us.

O U R F U T U R E

The Report and this letter focus on 2012. Of course

much time has already passed since then. 2013 has

been about pushing further on all of these fronts. We

have consolidated our presence in the seven countries,

and are now looking outwards again at further growth.

We have been honoured to have been approached by

other governments as well as development institutions

to work with them. We have published our first case

study, on the “first 150 days action plan” in Liberia,

and plan for others. We have held a public event with

President Jim Yong Kim of the World Bank and Tony

Blair on “the science of delivery”. We have completed

evaluations of our major programmes. And we con-

tinue to celebrate our fifth anniversary – this Report

coming out five years exactly since I boarded that first

plane to Sierra Leone. I look forward to telling you

about all of this and more next year; and you will see

more information on our website (www.africagover-

nance.org) in the meantime.

We are proud of the organisation we have built over the

last five years. We are ambitious for the next five. We

are deeply grateful to our many friends, funders and

supporters who have made it possible. And above all

else we are humbled and privileged to work alongside

the many public servants who are striving to change

their countries, and who this story is really about.

Africa is on the move. The challenges are immense,

but the leadership and the will are there. Change is

possible, and we’re excited to be a part of it.

It is a great privilege to be able to present AGI’s fourth

Annual Report. I hope you enjoy it.

Nick Thompson

I A M H O N O U R E D T O O N C E

A G A I N I N T R O D U C E T H E A F R I C A

G O V E R N A N C E I N I T I A T I V E ’ S A N N U A L

R E P O R T . A S N I C K S A Y S I N H I S

L E T T E R T H I S Y E A R , A G I I S N O

L O N G E R A S T A R T - U P A N D I T H A S

B E E N A P R I V I L E G E T O W A T C H T H E

O R G A N I S A T I O N G R O W I N T O N E W

C O U N T R I E S A N D I N I T S R E P U T A T I O N

A N D A B I L I T I E S .

Growth is exciting but also challenging for any organisation, so I would like to commend Nick as well as Kate before

him and the rest of the management team for their continual work to make sure AGI provides the same quality of

support to its new partner governments as it has done since its inception in Rwanda and Sierra Leone in 2008. At

its core AGI remains focussed on supporting the creation of capable institutions which can implement reforms for

the benefit of citizens, ultimately reducing poverty and improving lives.

The AGI Board also expanded in 2012 with the addition of Tunde Olanrewaju. Tunde is a Partner in McKinsey’s

London office where he leads the company’s UK Business Technology Practice. He is also a member of Oxfam

GB’s advisory board. He is an excellent and welcome addition to our team.

The Trustees would also like to thank our funders for their continued generous support without which AGI would

not be able to achieve what it has. We also want to say a special word of gratitude and congratulations to the new

Chief Executive, Nick Thompson, who the Trustees chose as the right leader for the organisation’s continued de-

velopment. He has the confidence of the staff and the Trustees to lead and grow AGI in line with its mission and

values. We would also like to thank the senior management team and staff of AGI; and the public servants they

work alongside in Africa for their commitment, passion and professionalism – they are the people that make AGI’s

work so special.

Liz Lloyd, Chair of the Board of Trustees

D O W N L O A D2 0 1 2 A N N U A L R E P O R T

( P D F )