In general, three waves of public sector reforms have emerged in Africa over the past three decades. The first generation was implemented as part of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) at the beginning of the 1980s. The aim of the reform was to provide conducive environment for private sector development; the second generation of public service reform focused on capacity building for improved service delivery. The third generation amplified service delivery, in a development prompted by the inadequacies of the first and the second wave of reforms. This study employs Ethiopia and Nigeria as case studies. Ethiopia has emerged from decades of civil war; famine and chronic poverty to embrace PSR as an essential component as the nation's economic reform agenda, with the country showing considerable improvements on governance indicators. The nation's strong economic performance, attributable to economic reforms, has continued for the tenth consecutive year, with real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth estimated at 9.7% in 2012/13. Nigeria has also embraced PSR as a cornerstone of its economic reform agenda. The nation's economic output also featured robust growth in 2013, estimated at 7.4% of GDP, up from 6.5% in 2012. The major objective of this study is to shed light on Africa's Public Sector Reform agenda, which reveals both challenges and opportunities. The paper employs empirical data in the study, revealing a robust public service reform agenda across Africa, with Ethiopia and Nigeria as case studies.

Over the past three decades, African countries have been reforming their public sector with a view to improving efficiency, effectiveness, accountability and transparency as part of efforts to improve the delivery of public services. Reform actions have included privatisation, public/private partnerships, commercialisation and adoption of private sector approaches in managing public organisations. This book, put together by OSSREA, reviews measures by African countries in that regard, the extent to which the measures have achieved their intended results, as well as the factors behind the failure to achieve those results, where this was the case.

Compared to other continents, Africa has the lowest tele-density and internet connectivity, the highest rate of people living below the poverty line (by 2002, 44 per cent of the people in sub-Saharan Africa live below the poverty level of $1 dollar a day), the highest rate of HIV-AIDS infections, the highest rate of infant mortality and maternal death rates, the highest level of unemployment and t. [...] The state was seen as central to the process of socio-economic engineering that the newly independent countries required, hence the establishment of the SOEs, among a range of institutional innovations intended to enhance the capacity of the state. [...] The cognizance of the dictatorship of the donor community and the consequent lack of African ownership of some of the key reform agendas, including the public sector reforms, led to the Paris Declaration of 2005 as a new aid architecture for Africa. [...] Ngowi highlights some of the challenges of privatisation, which include the infancy of the Tanzanian private sector, which has not enabled it to benefit from the privatisation process; the local private sector's lack of capacity and finance to take advantage of the process; and a lack of understanding by the public of privatisation, and its consequent resistance to it. [...] Another problem of the public sector reforms which Ngowi correctly identifies, with respect to agentification in Tanzania (which is also applicable to the private- public partnership), is the ability of the state to monitor the performance of the private partner/agent.

Key Principles of Public Sector Reforms contains case studies from Cameroon, Ghana, Grenada, India, Kenya, Rwanda, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania and Trinidad and Tobago on the policy reforms, strategies and methodologies that support national priorities and greater policy coherence for sustained development and growth.

The ability of governments and the global community to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, ensure security, and promote adherence to basic standards of human rights depends on people's trust in their government. However, public trust in government and political institutions has been declining in both developing and developed countries in the new millennium. One of the challenges in promoting trust in government is to engage citizens, especially the marginalized groups and the poor, into the policy process to ensure that governance is truly representative, participatory, and benefits all.