Welcome to the African Legislatures Project

The purpose of ALP is both simple and grand—to learn everything important there is to know about how African legislatures function. As such, ALP is an exercise that straddles the realms of academic research and practice – in this case, research into the operations of the legislature and what its findings suggest for African parliaments, organisations working in legislative and democratic reform and supportive donor agencies. ALP seeks to answer three basic questions:

• How and why do African legislatures function as they do? Why are some African legislatures developing into significant institutions that play a measurable role in democratic governance while others are not?

• What conditions and changes are required to develop and transform African legislatures into institutions that will sustain Africa’s fragile democracies?

• What constitutes “best practice” for the purpose of strengthening African institutions which are an essential component of democratisation on the continent?

To answer these questions, ALP has developed a range of quantitative and qualitative measures of legislative performance so that scholars and practitioners have a method for assessing and comparing the development of individual legislatures in relation to one another and over time.

Read more about ALP methodology across countries.