By Prince Ahenkorah
The Africa Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations Network (APMON), has launched the Second Edition of the Africa Open Parliament Index (OPI) in a virtual event that brought together civil society organizations, development partners, lawmakers, and media from across the continent.
The 2025 OPI provides a comprehensive assessment of 33 African national parliaments, measuring their performance across three critical dimensions of legislative openness: Transparency, Civic Participation, and Public Accountability.
The process has been a collaborative effort among partners who coordinate regional and national networks of parliamentary monitoring organizations across Eastern, Southern and West Africa.
Speaking during the launch, Mr Sammy Obeng, Secretary General of APMON, emphasized the growing importance of openness in strengthening democratic governance: “The OPI is not just a ranking ; it is a roadmap. It challenges parliaments to open up their work, engage citizens meaningfully, and demonstrate accountability. The 2025 edition shows encouraging progress in many countries, but also highlights areas where urgent reforms are needed.”
In the results published, the parliaments that ranked in the top three included the bicameral Parliament of South Africa (ranked 1st with an overall score of 79.69%), then the unicameral Parliament of Ghana (ranked 2nd with an overall score of 77.60%) and the bicameral Parliament of Kenya (ranked 3rd with an overall score of 73.96%).
Parliaments that ranked lowest in the Index included the Parliament of Comoros (ranked 31st with an overall score of 29.69%), the Parliament of South Sudan (ranked 32nd with an overall score of 28.65%) and the Parliament of Guinea-Bissau (ranked 33rd with an overall score of 28.13%).
The rankings put the South African Parliament as the most open parliament in Southern Africa, followed by the Parliament of Ghana leading in West Africa, and the Parliament of Kenya leading in East Africa.
The event featured a panel discussion of civil society leaders who reflected on the results and shared strategies for co-creating reforms that will make African parliaments more open, responsive, and citizen-centered.
APMON and its partners called on governments, parliaments, and development partners to work together to implement evidence-based reforms inspired by the index.
The Africa Open Parliament Index is a legislative transparency tool that seeks to measure the level of openness across national and regional parliaments in Africa, first published in 2022.
The Africa Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations Network (APMON) is a network of non governmental organizations and coalitions of civil society organizations that monitors the work of and/or regularly engages national, subnational and regional parliaments across Africa.
APMON seeks to enhance parliamentary transparency, accountability and citizen inclusion in parliamentary work across the continent, by promoting access to parliaments; developing tools to evaluate parliamentary performance; fostering citizen engagement with their national and regional parliaments; and facilitating peer learning among parliamentary engagement and monitoring organizations (PEMOs) in Africa.